Perspective

Everyone is still reeling at the devastation and loss of life from the Moore tornado yesterday.  Especially painful is the loss of so many children.  I feel the same way I did when I heard about the Newtown tragedy in December.  Thankfully, the kids are happy in  God's presence now, but they will still be mourned and missed.

I can't think of a tornado happening when I was a child.  I have vague memories, though, of my teen-age sisters making us smaller children get under the bed when it was stormy.  They were in charge of us while our mother was working at a "Rosie-the-Riveter" type job at an aircraft factory in Tulsa during WWII. 

My only real memory of a tornado happened the summer I turned 16.  I recall how the wind blew like a gale that day and the day before.  I had persuaded my mother to let me go home with my sister and brother-in-law who had been visiting from their home about 50  miles away.  During the night, it stormed there, and we all went to a neighbor's cellar.

The next day we learned that an F-5 tornado had hit Blackwell, Oklahoma, with much damage and 20 fatalities.  My family lived about a dozen miles away out in the country and had no damage, but the home of my boyfriend (and future husband), who lived in Blackwell in the affected area, was twisted on the foundation and they lost their detached garage. 

A dozen or so years later, I was relieved that my husband and children and I were moving away from tornado alley to New Orleans, where there were no tornadoes (I thought).  Our first year there, we were introduced to Hurricane Camille. I was clueless about the severity of such a storm, and when people around the country called to see if we were okay, I reported that our trash cans were blown over.  A few days later, we toured the damage in Gulfport, Mississippi, and I realized what a hurricane can do.

As our family grew, we found a house in the Mississippi countryside where, over the next 20 years, we experienced many hurricanes (accompanied by tornadoes) of varying intensity.  We found them exciting with the holiday atmosphere of schools being closed and Howard home from work. It was a ritual to drive around town to see what was closed and feel the spray of horizontal rain on our faces.

It wasn't until 2005 that we were seriously affected by a hurricane, that being Hurricane Katrina, which struck the gulf coast where we lived by that time.  Our church which my husband pastored became a distribution center for goods and food that had been donated by people all across America.  Again, despite the devastation, it was an exciting time as we ministered to hurricane victims in their FEMA trailers and brought them supplies.

Disasters often bring out the best in people, making them realize their need for God and the desire to help their fellow man.  Many, many references to prayer are being made in the television coverage of the Moore tornado.  Maybe that's the silver lining in all of this, that, and a poignant sign spotted in a pile of tornado debris that reads, "The most important things in life aren't things."  Amen!