There’s an image in my mind that will never go away.
A few months after Hurricane Katrina, I was riding through Biloxi, Mississippi, with a friend and Southern Living photographer, both of us stunned into silence. I had never seen anything like it. Recent footage of Laura’s damage brought those scenes back to me in unsettling detail.
Back then, we all watched daily images of New Orleans and the floods and the horrific loss of life, but for reasons I’ll never understand, the TV cameras rarely aimed at the Mississippi Gulf Coast, which got obliterated. Because of that, I had a hard time making anybody believe me when I tried to describe the totality of the damage.
Katrina’s storm surge, when it hit Mississippi, was 28 feet high. The whole beachfront—30-plus miles of it—was just erased. It was hard to know which town you were in because the only visible landmark left standing was the Biloxi lighthouse. The few buildings that remained had been blown out by the wind and the water.
And as we slowly drove through all of that, I remember looking out my window and seeing a woman with a dazed expression, standing in what used to be her yard I guess, with huge fallen trees all around her, the house badly damaged. It’s strange but I can’t remember whether she was holding a rake or a broom. I just remember watching her absently move it back and forth, this handheld tool that was no match for the enormity of the destruction all around.
It warms my heart to see friends in Mississippi posting words of encouragement to hurricane survivors in Louisiana and Texas because they’re living proof that there’s an “other side” waiting, once the storm passes over.
Maybe we all need to be reminded of that, given what I often see on Facebook: smiling faces with sad eyes, or at least, very tired ones. Right now, most of us probably have days when we feel like we’re trying to sweep up a hurricane with a broom. We’re way out of our depth and we know it. And I think we have to give the storm that is 2020 its due. Accept that we can’t repair the damage overnight but that eventually, everything will be renewed. There’s an “other side” waiting—we just have to give ourselves time to get there. And we aren’t traveling alone.
Be anxious for nothing,
but in everything by prayer and supplication,
with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God;
and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding,
will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.
Ephesians 4:6-7
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