I was sitting at home Saturday evening, around dinner time. The windows were open to let in a lovely breeze, and my next-door neighbors had fired up the grill to barbeque some spare ribs.
As the delicious aromas wafted in past my nose, I noticed that I was getting hungry myself. Thoughts of going downstairs to the kitchen and putting together a couple of hamburgers or a salad spun through my head, making my stomach grumble pleasantly.
Then it occurred to me that there had been a huge number of people in the Superdome that week, all hot, all homeless, all hungry, with nothing but their bitter tears and tremendous losses to eat. Children, seniors, working men and pregnant women – disaster was the great equalizer that had placed them all in this impossible situation.
I sat, smelling the fragrance of food cooking. I put off going downstairs to the refrigerator for a little while, just to get some small sense of what those poor people had had to endure for days. The pleasant hunger sensations turned nasty, grinding and violent, demanding to be quieted with a meal. I couldn’t concentrate on anything except the pain, the sense of gnawing emptiness. I grew dizzy and disoriented. I watched the little clock on my computer screen, counting off the minutes until I could go find something to eat. It nearly drove me crazy. At the end of an hour, I was ready to kill for a peanut butter sandwich...a piece of bread... ANYTHING!
When I finally went downstairs, it was with a whole new outlook on what those folks had to go through. And I asked myself "WHY?" The victims of natural disasters haven’t done anything worse than others do every day. They aren’t being punished like the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. They have simply been unfortunate enough to be in the way of a force of nature. Tomorrow it could be Neptune City, New Jersey that is hit with something similar. Am I going to spend my life worrying about whether or not I’ll be “safe”? Is anywhere really safe? Wouldn't my time be better spent trying to help those less lucky than myself?
I believe that God allows such things to happen: not because of a vengeful spirit, but as an opportunity for those more fortunate to reach out in brotherly love and compassion, to help in any way we can, to sympathize with the loss of an entire life’s worth of possessions, or the loss of a loved one, or the feeling of being without a home. For, in the end, what do we have if we don’t have love for one another?
With gratitude for the food in my pantry, the roof over my head, and the job to pay for it all,
One Day At A Time, With Love,
Eileen
cl-lovespirit_nj
"Love is not consolation. It is light."
