As I watched the path of Hurricane Ian wreck devastation on the Florida and South Carolina coasts, the stories became more and more difficult to hear. While we all can relate to loss at some level, rising sea water goes to a level most of us cannot fathom. There are thousands who have lost all their earthly belongings and are homeless without utilities or clean water. Others have lost their family members to lethal floodwaters and storm surges. When I see the pictures and videos, my check to the hurricane relief fund for batteries and blankets seems piddly and will only provide a temporary emotional band aid for lost loved ones and memories.
Many years ago, when I lived in Florida and had to evacuate for hurricanes, I tried to escape north along traffic lanes clogged with thousands of cars, inching along north to safety, emphasis on inching. I didn’t know what I would return to, or whether my house would be spared. What I remember most was the panic I felt stuck in the middle of the causeway across the Choctawhatchee Bay on Highway 331 to the mainland. It was bumper to bumper traffic and water was lapping across the two-lane and under my car, but I couldn’t move forward or back. At that point the loss of my home and my belongings paled in comparison to the real possibility that I might have to abandon my car and begin running for land.
We have been in our present home nearly twenty years now. The subject of moving comes up occasionally, but I feel sick inside if talk turns serious. I made all the handles on our hallway drawers and cupboards by hand and steam-bent a piece of wooden molding to wrap around the folding table I built in our laundry room. Outside in the garden, it’s taken five years to train a crape myrtle to vine up an old tree stump and bloom around a birdhouse my grandson and I built together. These and a myriad of other improvements have given our house a rich story, chronicled by the arthritis that seeps into my hands to remind me that my story is personal, but not to hold on to these earthly belongings too tightly.
A year ago, I wrote a piece about the mammoth black gum in our back yard that was slowly dying. It formed a magnificent arching umbrella over our entire backyard, sending out invitations to a menagerie of animals from foxes to pileated woodpeckers. Last week it was cut down limb by limb, an agonizing process to watch. I had visions, magical ones, that by morning a new tree would be back, no doubt stirred from a storybook that was read to me long ago. It was not to be.
I wrote this over a year ago regarding the loss of our gum and the impending empty space:
“We are left to accept this fact about our tree: that all living things perish at some point, and to embrace the mystery of this death event as part of life’s cycle.”
Birds now bypass our yard for another landing spot. In turn, Ian’s power reminds me of how little I really have control over, and how nature’s unbridled strength is an example of how much the Almighty has control over. The mighty hands that formed all of nature to begin with preside over its destructiveness as well as its rebirth. A recent sermon I heard encourages us to count three of God’s mercies for every two things we grumble about. There, in the path of the hurricanes of our bellyaching we will discover we cannot fall behind or be left behind with God’s mercies always a step ahead of us.
During the removal of our gum tree, thousand-pound limbs were lifted over our house, but none fell _on_ our house. Ten men cut and dragged one hundred years of growth down our driveway, but not one of those men was injured, nor any of our landscaping maligned. When the stump was ground down our fears that some insect infestation slowly killed our tree were unfounded and we realized our tree had simply died in its sleep, the most humane of all ways to go and was the gum’s way of saying goodbye.
The question that arises about loss is how do we say goodbye while there is still time, while we are still together?
We do so by saying things like, I love you, I’m sorry, and I admire you. We ask each other questions like these: May I hold you? What can I do for you? Where does it hurt? The mercy we need from our losses is in the time we have now, before the loss occurs, to say what really matters in the present. We find mercy in our time together, our prayers together, and our lives together. Events like Hurricane Ian are teaching us that lesson again, a lesson that cannot be replaced by piled boxes in our garages, a caramel Macchiato, or the china gathering dust in our mother’s armoire.
Allan Redpath, British pastor and author said this “There is no circumstances, no trouble, no testing, that can ever touch me until it has gone past God and past Christ, right through to me. If it has come that far, it has come with great purpose.”
I know people who have been exceedingly generous in sending relief to hurricane victims through their donations, supplies and time. Perhaps though, as we indulge ourselves eating corndogs at our local Fall Festival, we can extend, with heads bowed, extra mercies to Florida, and at least for a moment extend our prayers to a place we’ve all been, to a place where loss created a tidal surge in our heart, and sucked the life out of us, and nothing mattered more than God’s grace and mercy.