Tornado in our Town

My daughter and I stood out on the front porch and watched a lightening storm last month.

It was an amazing light show, spanning one horizon to the other. At times you could trace the zig zagging bolts from the sky right down to the ground. Thunder boomed continuously and a steady summer rain was silouted against the street light. We just leaned against the porch rail and enjoyed the extravaganza.

About the time that mosquitos corraled us back into the house, we heard the local storm siren.

"Is that for a warning or a watch?" I asked my daughter.

She went up to bed, and I clicked on the TV weather channel. Red and purple blotches covered our entire dopplar radar map, which was nothing new. But I had never seen the little red circles clustered over an area before. The weather man calmly explained that radar considered those to be circling air masses that either looked like, or were tornados. And like little red balloons, they were drifting right towards our part of the map. Like thousands of people, I watched transfixed as the circles made there way closer toward our home. The gentle summer rain turned ugly and our trees bent and whirled in the confused air mass outside.

Just one town away, more than one hundred homes were lost. Miraculously, no one died.

Usually I sleep right through a storm. Had it not been for the siren or TV, I would have had no idea how close we came to our poor neighbors' fate in the next town.

I wonder what else I've slept through while others suffer personal tragedy in the next town, or neighborhood, or office. Last month, our neighbor across the street quietly packed up their belongings and moved out of state. They gave us a few things and we exchanged contact info. Only after they made the move did we learn that they were going through bankruptcy, just as he retired from his job. How long had the little red circles been drifting over their lives as we slept, oblivious to their troubles, across the street? We'll never know.

I'm going to try and pray more diligently for my neighbors. For problems known and unknown, spoken and unspoken. Around here, people are taught to run to the basement when tornados approach, so we get separated at the peak of danger. Maybe I need to hang out on the porch more - when we're just talking about the weather, instead of hiding from it.

What do you believe?