I've been combing the news for reports of damage in the area I used to and still call "home." A school collapsed, trees down, roads blocked, power out --- these are significant but except for the school, the same things happen every time a hurricane or severe thunderstorm go through the area. But a tornado? I never remember a tornado going anywhere near us in the years I spent there.
As more news is available, I have more cause for worry. Oh, I'm sure my family members on the south side of my river are safe. There aren't any reports of major stuff coming from there, but the once sleepy and rural areas north of the river where Daddy's family came from and some of their descendants still live have been hit, including my nephew. Oh, the area has developed almost by explosion; where there used to be fields and truck farms and meadows and virgin forest are now blocks of houses, strip malls and fast fooderies. The narrow roads and lanes we used to drive down to visit the relatives or go to the cemetery where so many of the relations now rest are now splayed across the news as areas hard-hit by the storms. I read -- and I worry.
I'm sure my family is all right. It's Palm Sunday. I'm sure most, if not all, are in church, celebrating the ride into Jerusalem and preparing for Easter. Another nephew, this one a preacher, will be preaching on that gospel, I'm sure, and my brother and sister-in-law will be sitting in their usual pews. I pray as I wonder, though, about those who should be sitting in the little church that stands watch over the graveyard across the river where so many lie -- aunts, uncles, a niece, cousins by the score, and my adoptive mother and father among them -- and which are surrounded by deep woods.
I took a google-tour of the area not a month ago, seeing the changes but also seeing the unchanged. I wonder now, how much of what I saw then is no longer there.
It hasn't been hard to pray for the people of Haiti, China, Japan and all the people of the world shaken by disaster of a magnitude that is almost unimaginable to us. It has been easy to pray for them; I don't know them by name or the streets on which they live. It's harder to get my jumbled thoughts together so as to pray coherently for those whose names I do know and who live on roads and streets that I've known from my childhood. There have been deaths in that area; I pray none of them have a familiar name just as I pray for comfort and strength for those who have been affected by this storm, wherever and whoever they are.
*****
I paused while writing this and called home. No answer until a few minutes ago when I reached my sister-in-law. They still don't know the names of the dead but my nephew is safe and helping those neighbors who were harder hit. There was other news, not so good, but that was something else entirely.
Thank you, God, for the family, as far-distant in many ways as the people in Japan or Haiti but still close enough so that phone lines can carry news both ways. thank you for the technology that can cause me to worry or cause me to cease worrying.
God, be with those across this country who've suffered injury or death or damage from this storm. May next Sunday, Easter Sunday, be a day of resurrection -- hopes, dreams, restoration, renewal and replenishment. My anxiety has abated, on that situation anyway. The family is safe. That dark night is over even though the sun has been up for hours.
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