I intended today to post an epilogue to our government repairs series. No worries; we’ll post it here soon. But some of life’s events make me pause and reflect on what’s most important.
From Reuters: One of the most powerful storms ever recorded killed at least 10,000 people in the central Philippines, a senior police official said on Sunday, with huge waves sweeping away coastal villages and devastating one of the main cities in the region.
Super typhoon Haiyan destroyed about 70 to 80 percent of structures in its path as it tore through Leyte province on Friday, said police chief superintendent Elmer Soria, before weakening and heading west for Vietnam. As rescue workers struggled to reach ravaged villages along the coast, where the death toll is as yet unknown, survivors foraged for food or searched for lost loved ones. “People are walking like zombies looking for food,” said Jenny Chu, a medical student in Leyte. “It’s like a movie.”
Most of the deaths appear to have been caused by surging sea water strewn with debris that many said resembled a tsunami, leveling houses and drowning hundreds of people in one of the worst disasters to hit the typhoon-prone Southeast Asian nation. The national government and disaster agency have not confirmed the latest estimate of deaths, a sharp increase from initial estimates on Saturday of at least 1,200 killed by a storm whose sustained winds reached 195 miles per hour (313 km per hour) with gusts of up to 235 mph.
“We had a meeting last night with the governor and the other officials. The governor said, based on their estimate, 10,000 died,” Soria told Reuters. “The devastation is so big.”
We have a couple ways we could wrestle with the reality.
We could quietly concede we live on the other side of the globe and thus pay little attention… kind of the out of sight, out of mind strategy. We could feel bad, but not take things too much to heart.
We could also focus on the fact that these people are different than us… different language, different ethnicity. It’s sometimes easier to have compassion only on the likeminded, like-lifestyles, and like-demographics.
Or… We could wrestle with the fact that the deceased had little forewarning that this would be the hour and the day they exited Earth. Certainly, when they awoke that morn, they did not know this would be their time.
If we awoke each morning not knowing the time, how would we live differently?
Would we be kinder?
Less judgmental?
More compassionate?
Would we practice what we say we believe?
Would we be quick to say “I’m sorry” and even quicker to say “I forgive you”?
Would we quit fighting for only the Democrats, only the Republicans, only the blacks, only the religious? Would we quit fighting? Would we eradicate the hypocrisy from our own lives?
Some of life’s events make me pause.
Respectfully…
AR