Season of Hope
A piece of home without storms.
You may have heard about the tornadoes that devastated the southeast last weekend. One of the states left broken in pieces was Kentucky, which is my home.
Around 1:15 Saturday morning we were woken by tornado sirens. By the time the warning ended, we had gotten word of widespread destruction, but we didn’t know how much of it was close to us. The power went out before the warning ended, and I fell back asleep around 3 a.m. with lightning flashing through the windows, my husband beside me scrolling his phone, horrified by the mounting damages from the far western corner of the state.
Text messages woke me–from my sister and parents, from people at school, all checking to see how things were. Then the posts started rolling over Facebook, and when we left our house that morning, the landscape of familiar places was no longer so familiar.
A family piled garbage bags of what they could salvage into open trunks, while their living room furniture sat beneath the open sky.
Men swarmed over roofs, nailing down bright blue tarps.
Gorgeous stands of woods had been ripped, the old trees broken and sticking up like toothpicks.
A friend surveyed his home, which was spared but surrounded by fallen trees, and told us about his terror in the night when the wind screamed around his house, sounding like a freight train roaring overhead.
My original church home, where I attended for the first 22 years of my life, was a wreck. The steeple lay broken on the ground. The fellowship hall roof was peeled away, trees were down all over, and the fellowship hall door bowed under the swaying wall. I was married in that church, and I ran outside under that steeple to the showers of rice and cheers of family and friends. Now some of the beautiful stained glass windows were blown out, and everything was so quiet except for our gasps of disbelief.
My heart hurts.
I always want to wrap up every hard story with a tidy bow, but there is no lesson or moral to all this. The tornado bounced and skipped and swayed its way through areas I love and tore through homes and businesses and memories. People are dead. People are homeless. Children are missing. People are confused and broken and hurting. My kids’ teachers keep calling and texting, trying to check on their students. When I talked to my daughter’s teacher this afternoon, she told me about one of my daughter’s classmates who lost his home. One of my daughter’s teachers also lost her home. There is no sense to make of it.
It’s Christmas, and there is so much sadness right now. We are in Advent, a season of waiting, and of hope. I’m struggling with both of those things. But as I try to process this weekend, and I try to let myself sit in the hurt, I see ways that while I can’t change the suffering around me, I can let this situation change me.
Because here’s the other thing that’s been happening: People are helping. Schools lost power and closed, and teachers grilled in the parking lot and drove the meals to surrounding families trying to clean up the wreckage. A group from my school brought chainsaws to my friend’s house and helped him clean up the broken trees, and they drove to each need they heard. People bought food and water and delivered it. Churches organized volunteer groups. Schools collected donations and opened as Red Cross centers. Needs were met. Lives were changed.
It’s Christmas, and there is so much sadness, and that’s not going anywhere. But hope rises as I see how even in hard times, people are reaching for each other.