from the pages of Common Prayer
How could I ever possibly find words to thank you for your loving, gracious response to the tornado post? Writing that was one of those increasingly rare happenings where I just sat down and opened a vein. Thank you for your words of concern and your prayer for our community.
My sister called me in tears last night; she had just watched one of many videos that captured the tornadoes that touched down here. She didn't realize how close . . . how bad. I didn't either until I drove past scenes like this:
And of course there is this part of me that wants to say, it's not Joplin. It's not Alabama. But there I go, falling into that hierarchy of suffering trap that Megan wrote about at Velveteen Mind all those years ago. It is bad. It is bad for those whose businesses were battered; for those who are staring down concrete slabs where houses once stood; for those wandering empty pastures - cows and horses one minute here, the next moment gone; for those whose financial files ended up on lawns of strangers ninety miles away. It is bad.
It is unspeakably, incomprehensibly bad for the Hamil family in Piedmont. They found Ryan, the missing three year old, found his little body in a lake yesterday morning. Yesterday, the same day one of his baby pictures blew into the yard of a fellow Oklahoman. And I can't shake the image of having children ripped from my arms, entire lives twisted into wreckage left behind.
Mere words fail.
And from my kitchen window yesterday, a ridiculously beautiful day splayed itself forth.
And our community has pulled together and poured out ridiculous amounts of support for the victims.
And it seems more than ridiculous that I should fall back into routine so easily, taking the girls to the playground and making a pizza for dinner and settling in for evening TV time with my husband.
But here we are.
I know that I know that all of creation groans for Christ's return, for the restoration that comes only through Him for whom all things were created. I know that the body of Christ has united to be hands and feet and heart, here and across the state and across the country and across the world. Ann Voskamp's timely words on Wednesday remind me that He is Emmanuel, God with us.
And so I limp, heavy-hearted, spirit-burdened, into His embrace.
