A couple of weeks ago, on March 27 & 28, our neck of the woods got hit hard by a bunch of tornadoes. Birmingham didn't suffer as much as Tuscaloosa, but the damage around here is still staggering. Thankfully, we did not personally suffer any damage to our property and only lost power for a little over 24 hours. Actually, we lost power because of the tornadoes and storms on Tuesday evening, and therefore we were out of the information loop during the even more severe weather during the afternoon on Wednesday. Thankfully, one of Marcus's bosses (who still had power), heard that we were out of power and invited us to bring the kids to their house and spend the afternoon & night in their basement. They were staying on top of forecast for the second set of storms, and knew it wasn't a good idea for us to be in our basement-less house with three little kids. I'm still amazed at their thoughtfulness, since they had just brought their second child home from the hospital three days before! And in hindsight, realizing how little we knew about the second storms in our powerless house, and realizing how differently Thursday could have gone if the storms had followed their originally projected path right through Hoover, instead of turning north, I am even more grateful to Dr. & Mrs. Burnett. So our night of historic tornadoes was spent pretty peacefully, eating chicken alfredo & crescent rolls and visiting with the Burnett's in their basement while all the older kids watched movies and the newborns slept.
Unfortunately, many others around here have a very different story. Our church, like many others, has been busy organizing and mobilizing to help with the relief effort. We're all helping any way we can, with donations and labor and time. One of our elders sent out a motivational email to his "Tree Team" (tree and debris removal), reminding them of the old adage: "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at at time," to encourage them. The amount of work to be done and the needs of so many displaced families is truly daunting. Since Lydia is attached to me for feeding, all I've been able to do so far is clear out our pantry of anything we don't need right now for donations and sign up to babysit other people's kids while they go out in the work groups (and keep mine, too, so Marcus can go).
Our church also started a toy drive for the kids who lost their homes, and Caleb and Ethan spent yesterday morning going through all of the toys in their playroom and deciding which to donate and which to keep. Let me set this scenario up for a minute... Caleb and Ethan love their toys. Some of their friends are not really that into playing with toys and most of their toys sit on the shelf and collect dust, but Caleb and Ethan are not of that race. They play with their toys all day long: together, independently, with their friends, etc. There are really not any toys in our play room that go weeks without any play time (the Toy Story toys would have been happy to land at our house :). So, back to my point, this selection process was no easy thing for them. I didn't force or even persuade them to give up anything, and the rule was that if either of them didn't want to give it away, then it stayed. Even so, they together chose about a fifth of their toys to donate to the kids who lost everything. Some of them were kind of hard for Marcus and I to let go because they were recent purchases or longtime favorites, but we kept our mouths shut and let them give as they saw fit. We were both very proud of the pile they collected, and we look forward to taking it to church on Sunday.
No comments:
Post a Comment