Stories were told. I suspect every disaster has its own folklore that races through the battered towns. Little children rescued from coolers citing women with wings as their saviors, adults flung hundreds of feet only to stand and help their neighbor, five people found in a basement in this town, three people rescued from a basement in another. Each day, without the help of a TV or radio we heard more stories of hope. Each day they brought a smile to our faces.
Humanity needs hope. Most of the time these stories whether partially true, true or truly figments of someone's imagination stoke the embers of hope. They are like a sugar pill, they make tomorrow more bearable and if they are true, all the better.
One story was different. Every disaster or human tragedy has this story. The characters and places are different the message is the same. It is a story of brightly colored, candy coated poison.
A man of faith had been away from his home and when he returned the valley around his home, a place of drug dealers, was decimated. Houses were piles of rubble. His home, his pets, his cars were untouched. My friend's face was enraptured. The tornado had spun out at the bottom of his hill and couldn't make it up.
I smiled and nodded. My stomach cramped and my heart bled, grated raw by the lack of compassion in the story for the families in the valley. Families who most certainly suffered and will continue to suffer for their loss of life and homes.
In a few of my photos there were shots, specific ones that were a rebuttal to this innocent story that poured toxic into my heart from that day forward. Photos of the box labelled "Missions" that was flung from the place on the granite counter top where items were put in to donate, the counter top pulverized. Photos of an inner wall that has, "Every good and perfect gift comes from above." The rest of the house crushed like an egg. Ironic.
I wanted to grab my friend and beg for him to see, there are no favorites. There isn't always reason, not always an answer to impose upon this chaos. Everyone suffers together. We crave black and white yet are gifted with a insipid gray haze. In that dreaded pallid haze, is a place of grace. It is here that I found humanity grabbed hands, rough hewn and straight laced, broken and whole, deserving and undeserving and struggled to rise above the obliteration of their existence.
But in my abraded heart I still hemorrhage anguish for the callousness of the 'favored' who will never understand the gift of the haze.
4 comments:
Spectacular sister!! I wouldn't change a thing
Ok thank you Eric for looking it over and giving me your opinion. I wasn't sure if that part held together.
Yah. I've turned angry so often when hearing praise and gratitude for being spared. When the plane I was on in Chile almost crashed but didn't, three months after Uncle Terry's ultralight fell. There are no favorites. It only seems true that we're all in this together and the presence of Presence in the middle of suffering is healing and holds it all together. You write of this so well (as always!).
I can't imagine what part you were afraid wouldn't hold together, this is, as Eric already said, spectacular writing.
When my first child died in the nicu, we attended a memorial service with other families who'd had similar losses. One of the volunteers said she "felt like she had to come because God had loved her enough to save her daughter" when she had been in the same nicu months before.
I don't think she realized how incredibly hurtful the other side of that coin felt, or how ugly her words were.
Unfortunately I've encountered that attitude countless times since then.
Natural disasters (like cancer, genetic defects, and every other inhuman force of destruction) are mindless, heartless, soulless events that touch the righteous and the unrighteous (by whatever measurement someone happens to use) without discrimination.
What the world desperately needs is more people like you who practice compassion for the sake of compassion, and not to appease some fear of an angry god.
This might sound corny, but I'm am very proud that in my life I have called you "friend."
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