Smell the Onion

Sigh.  It’s bad, friends.  So very bad.  I have lived
with this sense-dampening awareness of the horror that exists so very
close to me for several days now.  I cannot watch the TV, and
mercifully, the speakers on my computer are broken, so I couldn’t hear
the man describe having to let go of his wife to save his children in
the surging flood. 

I was frustrated with my daughter
tonight.  She would not go to sleep.  I finally left her with
her dad, and came to the computer to read some more.  I read about
babies dying in their mothers arms for want of water or basic medical
care.  Seventy miles away from my chair.  I went back in and
clung to my child and sobbed.  This world is so very broken.

I had a dream two nights before the Hurricane.  I was being held
against my will, in a dark, deserted place, by an evil and terrifying
person.  I dreamt the very moment that I realized that there was
nothing in the universe that could rescue me, and no way to run
away.  I woke up barely breathing.  I have never felt that
kind of despair in waking hours, and I lay awake for along time,
haunted by the knowledge that there are so very many people on this
planet who have no reprieve from such a consuming despair, awake or
asleep.  Now it is so very close, and it also continues a thousand
thousand times over at different places.

I can hear the helicopters as I type, headed to Nola.

I had another dream the next night.  A person dear to me lay in
the hospital, diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor.  He was to
undergo surgery the next day.  No one knew if he would live. 
In my head, I kept screaming “what will I do?” “how can I manage to hold
on to my faith if *this* is taken from me?”  again, the unbearable
desperation.  And then, in to my head, came a voice, saying “On the
mountain of the Lord, it will be provided.”  In that moment, in
the midst of my bone-crushing grief, I knew that neither death nor life
was going to tear me from the grip of my Saviour.  I woke up
whimpering. 

We are not here to do the things we fill up our
days with.  We are not.  If the visible earth is all there is, than
there is nothing that makes a trip here worth the gamble.  Praise
God that this is not it.