From an article in the New York Times, about a family in Alabama … “His name is Corey Soper and he is 33. He lives just outside Tuscaloosa, but works as a welder on a pipeline in Nevada, because that is where the work is. Now, after a heart-pounding day of worrying from a distance for the safety of his wife and two young children, he was coming home to a broken house, clutching a blue luggage ticket that represented the only clothes he had left.
And yet he considered himself lucky, so very lucky. His family is safe, he said, his voice tight. “And now we can build new memories.”
Their house is on Rifle Range Road in Cottondale, where the roof has been swept away, bits of insulation cling to the grass like artificial snow and an eight-foot tree branch pierces the living room wall. This is the home of a very fortunate man.
In time, Mr. Soper led a small army of power-saw-toting relatives and friends in clearing the jumble of fallen trees from his two-acre lot. If a tornado’s call sounds like freight trains and swarms of bees, humankind’s response sounds like growling, determined power saws
He worked through the warm day, not a cloud in the sky, and into dusk, well aware that others in this state were mourning their dead. Sweat-stained and flecked with sawdust, he occasionally looked up to see his wife and his two children in their altered yard, working, making new memories.
His house nearly destroyed, he felt blessed.”
We are in fact blessed in so many ways, and we don’t need a disaster to remind us. But it is in crisis … in our lives or in others’ lives … that we most clearly understand what is truly important. Celebrate life … that is the richest blessing we all have.
And know that anything lost can be replaced. Except life.
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