I’m at home after church on Sunday talking to my wife about how
we handled the tornado warning that went off during the cup portion of the
Lord’s Supper at our Milwaukee church.
The phone rings, and my buddy from Illinois says, “Are your in-laws
okay? I was watching the Bears game and
they said that Washington, IL, was wiped out by a tornado. Isn’t that your wife’s hometown?”. Not that I have a lot of experience in this
category, but these types of questions typically put a new spin on your day.
We make phone calls to my in-laws. After a few no-answers, my wife gets through,
and finds out everyone is okay. The
tornado barely missed the community center where her family meets for church. It missed the community center, but, it had managed
to create a path through the middle of town, through apartments, housing
developments, ending in farmland.
Everything in this path was dismantled and then deposited in mangled
forms all over the city.
We started looking at pictures on the internet. The pictures could have been taken anywhere,
all the landmarks were gone, everything was leveled and looked like your
average pile of debris. We eventually found
out that among approximately 1,000 damaged homes, only one person had died. For some reason this made the damage seem more bearable.
We decided to head down to Washington to help with the
clean-up over the weekend. Friday night
we arrived in Washington before the 6:00 PM curfew. Saturday morning, myself, my wife, her Dad
and brother, all went over to the Bethany Community Church to get our volunteer
assignment. However, the line for
assignments was out the door, parking was backed up on the street. Instead of waiting potentially hours in the
cold to get an assignment, our crew decided to risk getting through the policed
barricades and going into the affected area on our own.
We waited in line outside of the affected area for about 30
minutes as cars were checked by the police, and, we finally entered to what
looked like the aftermath of a bombed out village in a World War 2 movie. Piles of debris were everywhere, homes gone,
vehicles flipped over, walls missing, glass and splintered wood everywhere,
insulation blowing around like snow flurries.
We jumped in helping people with their homes. And, there was a spectrum of damage. Over the course of the weekend, we helped
homes that had damage, but were still livable.
They must have felt blessed to have come so close to the tornado, but
with minimal damage. We helped people
whose homes will likely need to be destroyed, but they weren’t hit hard enough
that they lost all their belongings.
They must have felt blessed to have been in the path of the tornado, but still
been able to have pictures, clothes, stuffed animals, memories. And, for others the tornado made everything
disappear. I imagine they are thankful
for their lives.
We attended a worship service on Sunday with a church family
who had been spread out during the week.
Spread out all over Washington, but grateful to be serving, grateful for
their lives, grateful that their community center is several 100 yards to the
west, grateful for a higher hope, grateful for a church calendar that had been
wiped clean with one thing now written on it “Help people – physically and
spiritually”. We sang as a body of Christ.
We prayed as a body. We opened
God’s Word together.
The world is a mix of happy and sad and in-between. The world is complicated. Some people lose their house. Some people lose all the letters their
deceased father wrote to his children for their eighteenth birthdays. Some people have their spouse die only to
have their name infamously changed to “at least only one person died” and
repeated 10,000 times every day all over the community.
We hear things like this and they sound unbearable. And, in some ways they are, but over the
course of my weekend in Washington, I kept noticing that the mixed feelings I
was observing in myself seemed familiar.
We, as Christians, know of a story of happiness and
sadness. In our church services, we sing about death. We thank
God for sending Jesus to die to pay the penalty for our sins. We are told to rejoice in trials. We’re an odd breed. But, maybe it’s actually not odd at all,
maybe it’s the only thing complicated enough to make sense of a complicated
world. A complicated world, where I hurt
and rejoice at the same time. A
complicated world, where a savage tornado does something horrible and yet
brings a community together in a nearly impossible way. A world where a church can go from fearing
for their lives in a hallway of a community center to having two packed services
the following week and blessing the community with the spoken message of the
gospel.
“We”. That can be a
beautiful word. Knowing that it’s not
all about you. In an ultimate sense, the
ultimate “we” occurs between a Heavenly Father and his children. But, there’s a “we” in the body of Christ,
the church. And, part of the beauty of a body is
that it is together. It’s together all
the time. Sometime your hands are
working fine, but you have a head ache.
Sometimes your hands feel arthritic, but there’s no headache. Our bodies are a mix of pleasure and
pain. As a church body, we function this
way.
We know Jesus who has suffered more than anyone. We know that God is sovereign in the ups and
downs of life. And, as we understand
these things, I think we reach out to others.
We know about suffering, because our body suffers and our Head
suffered. Our faith family is full of
people who are suffering while simultaneously experiencing joy and
sustenance. There’s something core to
our faith that relates to your ups and downs.
It makes sense of them. It gives
them purpose.
We can’t explain all the reasons for suffering. But, observing life in Washington, IL, over
the weekend, I feel convinced that suffering provides the home field advantage
for faith of a believer.
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