LAUS DEO

In Life's Losses

Before bedtime last night my laptop hummed, cluttered with open docs and web portals. As I shut down for the night, I noticed under the clutter a corner of a doc entitled “My 2011 Journey” in blue cut and paste mode. My fingers click clicked, closed, no wait! I reopened the Word document that once had at least 150 pages.

Word had just queried: “Do you want to save the changes you made on My2001Journey.docx?” I answered in foolish autopilot. Despite weariness from a 12-hour workday, my beloved engineer did all that he could to solve my intractable error and no backed up files.

Thousands of recorded thoughts were in that journal. Fertile food for blogs, tweets, Christmas letters, and articles are now blank white. A half a year of scribed memories and reflection, only a single paragraph remains in a January bit file.

Oddly this loss does not undo this writer. God is with me. I now need to discern what He plans for me to reveal afresh from life’s experiences via the lens of His Word.

Like a visit to one home destroyed by a tornado two hours from us in a country hollow between two southern villages.

Howard's End

That lumber pile above was once a three-bedroom house for six people, four of them children. I met their mom, Dawn, a sister in Jesus.

Dawn could never sleep in a storm. With the electricity off and the large propane gas tank removed from their property sometime before, she had the oil lamps flickering that night. The air set heavy with humidity. In the distance she and her sleepy husband could barely make out the horns. But she and her husband heard the tornado train-like roar. Living in a geographic hollow where storm fronts jumped by, Dawn realized the twister would not veer from her home. The lamps blew out before that roar deafened. Her husband ran to a bedroom and grabbed two kids. Dawn ran and grabbed two kids. In a home with no basement, they cowered under pillows in a windowless hallway. Thank God one pillow sucked upward to block the hole above them.

The house’s utter destruction did not destroy this family. Provident God is with them. A day after the storm, Dawn flunked a psych test to become a policeman. Days later her fellow officers said it was okay since they were all crazy, anyway.

Laus Deo. Praises be to God!