Storm

Early, early Tuesday morning the sirens woke me up.  I’ve always lived where there are periodic storms, so I paused.  Did I really want to rouse my entire family from their beds?  The wind didn’t sound that bad.  I did get them up.  We made it to our ‘safe as we can get in a house without a basement spot.’  The storm passed, not close by.  The alarms kept sounding...I kept checking, but our watch was over.  I went to sleep thinking all was fine with the world, just one of those things picked up on radar.  As I slept, people lost their homes, their friends, their family members, their lives.  How many paused at the siren?  How many never heard it, in the dark of night?

The storm was on the ground for over 50 miles.  Fifty miles?!

Due to the overwhelming number of people at a supply drop off station, we accidentally passed through an area of our town that had been hit.  Thankfully, we didn’t see houses, but we saw trees turned to toothpicks.  Power still out.

We’ve checked on friends.  We’ve been checked on.  No one we know directly lost anything, any one.  But the stories.  The friends of a friend who lost so much...  The people whose dog’s persistent barking saved them.  Those thrown from homes, yet still survived.  People who huddled over their children as their roofs were torn away.  For peace beyond understanding despite the trauma, for comfort in loss, for restoration for what was lost.

God is there in the midst of the storms of life.  The tornado, the Corona virus, the moving on of friends and favorite youth ministers.  It’s been a rough week here.  It seems odd that normal life is going on out there.  Like September 11th, the skies have been a beautiful blue, in stark contrast to the mess.  It feels like everything should stop spinning, with schools out here, some of them flattened completely, people literally picking up the pieces.  But life keeps right on going.  Elections, bills, meals to prepare, laundry.  Those bits and pieces that keep up the normalcies, which help us move through the bumpy parts of life.  There are those without those routines right now, but hopefully, with lots of volunteers and some time, they too will find the rhythm come back to their days.