I Don't Really Know What To Say

This is my home -- the streets I drive on every day to go to the places we inhabit.

Both of the churches we belong to and worship in are damaged -- one completely destroyed, the other being flooded with unstoppable rain through a roof that's been torn away. 

My daughters' preschool and the church it belongs to -- there is only open air between crushed walls.  Between walls that saw Mia's preschool graduation last Thursday evening.  Walls that held happy parents and proud children.

Streets full of homes that were landmarks as we made our way through our days -- crumbled.  We don't even know where we are sometimes.

Trees are naked.  Bare bones reaching to a sky that's been filled with lightning for the past 30 hours.

The hospital where my daughters were born into a beautiful, terrifying world -- directly hit...unspeakably harmed.  Irreparably harmed?  It's a beacon over our city, standing defenseless, once hidden by neighborhoods and view-blocking trees, now starkly visible.

My aunt Sherry, my aunt Susie, my cousin Julie, my dear friends Annie and Jason -- have lost their homes and possessions.  The tornado ripped through a heavily populated part of our city, and those four homes were in a place that wasn't completely leveled.  Merely ruined.  There are so many more.  Friends of family, church family, friends I only hear from through Facebook...homeless and scared.

But all of this -- terrifying and devastating enough -- is small when I consider: there are lives lost here, where I've grown up, blocks away from where we sat hiding in our closet during the storm.  While we hid and made shadow shapes on the wall with our flashlight, lives were being ripped apart. 

Our home is unharmed and we are safe.  We emerged to the dinner table before we realized how badly our city was hurt.

People are still being uncovered, but the storms and rain and lightning won't cease.  It seems our hometown will be flooded soon. 

Maybe with tears.



If you'd like to help Joplin recover, my dear friends at Bigger Picture Blogs are organizing a fundraiser.  If you feel so compelled, your help would be greatly appreciated.  And your prayers -- continuing prayers as we dig out of this disaster -- would be greatly coveted.