Last Sunday evening, May 22 to be exact, the city where I lived with my wife for 12 years, Joplin, Missouri, was hit by an F5 tornado. It was one of the worst twisters ever recorded. Nearly two hundred dead, many more are still reported missing. 30-40% of the city is simply gone. I'm very sad.
I grew up about twenty minutes south of there in the small town of Neosho. There are around 10,000 living and that number hasn't really changed for years. We moved there in 1973 from Modesto, California. We moved there just before another twister ravaged the town in the Spring. I remember the sounds vividly. I sat with my mom and dad and baby brother along with an aunt and uncle and cousins in a basement garage inside a station wagon. It doesn't haunt me, per se, but I still remember it vividly--we had a very old oak tree absolutely plucked up by its roots and tossed over like a child's toy. We moved to Montana not too long after that. That's another story. I moved to Joplin after my wife and I were married. As I told some others, you my leave Joplin, but Joplin never leaves you.
The night after the storm we frantically tried getting hold of our friends, looking at Facebook--anything we could do to make sure that they were all right. All the time we kept looking at images of our destroyed neighborhood. One family that we are very close to, in fact they had just left our lovely state a week before, survived the storm inside a closet while their home just blew away. Another friend--single mother--barely made it to the bottom floor of her apartment building before it was whisked away by that hammer from the sky. And yet another family's son was at Home Depot when the storm smashed into it. They're all alive, thank God.
We lived a few blocks north east of St. John's hospital. In fact if you were to go onto Google Earth you can still see the truck I owned at the time that someone surreptitiously took a picture of our home--that freaks me out, too. But that is another story in itself.
If it helps put perspective on how these catastrophes can shape us, I really wanted to share about our neighborhood. We lived on 22nd and Moffett, right on the corner. We had three beautiful magnolia trees in our front yard. My wife gave birth to two of our children there. I watched my oldest daughter move from infancy to a lovely young girl.
Down the block we had other good friends that we would visit on occasion. We met because the wife had crashed into our car on a winter night while turning a corner. That too is another story. Further down the block was another special place, but not in the way that you might think (not that I know what you are thinking). This was a transformational place. It was a community-based residential care facility or CBRF. The name of the place was GreenBriar. They housed people who needed help living. There were those who were either sickly, at the onset of Alzheimer's, dimensia, or put there because they had no family or their family couldn't care for their needs any more.
Every Wednesday, about one year before we moved to Wisconsin, we began visiting some of the residents. We did that as the result of some talks at our local church. We wanted to serve and love people and this was an opportunity close to our home. There were two men that I visited--funny I can't remember their names right now. One of them was a bomber pilot during WWII. He described his experience on those B-29s like this: "hours of absolute boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror." Another was a lonely man who longed for the day when he would return to his home in Carl Junction. He was a simple man--stereotypically Missourian (I are one). One had family who visited some; the other had family but felt abandoned by them.
I made boxes out of fine wood for them. I made paintings for them. I talked to them. I did what I could. I loved them with the little I had. I told them about Jesus. I told them what I understood about God at the time (they didn't know of course that God was taking me to school). They in turn, changed me. Life had dramatically affected them. Their loneliness and my weakness met and we communed with God together. That was several years ago now. I know that the WWII pilot died--his name was Bob, I remember now. The other man, I'm not sure. I inexcusably lost touch during our move (horrible part of a selfish heart). Now I'll probably never know. You see, the tornado completely destroyed GreenBriar.
When my wife and I looked at the pictures we were incredulous. We couldn't grasp the magnitude of the destruction. We didn't fully understood that the Joplin that we knew had simply vanished. So I grieve. I grieve at the loss of life, of memories that will fade over time, of the brief time that we spent there (our life is so short). But I am also learning to be thankful. We did have time there. We did touch lives and others profoundly changed ours. We will go back, not in a Douglas MacArthur fashion. I have skill in the trades. I've built homes before. I can do that stuff. We would go with our memories and try to help rebuild in some fashion our city.
