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A little town in Kansas was blown away last night by a big tornado. I don't often watch Fox news but was pointed toward it this nmorning by an urgent call from my mother. Greensburg, Kansas has been the lead story on Fox all day. A little town, about 1500 people. The town where we used to visit my paternal grandmother, 40 years ago. About the same size yesterday as it was then, and much the same atmosphere all through these last four decades and several before that. The epitome of small town America, in many ways. A town I never lived in, but always think of when Bruce Springsteen's "My Home Town" comes on, or "Glory Days," or Dream Academy's "Life in A Northern Town." The pictures today of tornado devastation were especially poignant in this little community whose big claim to fame was the "World's Largest Hand Dug Well." But the water tower highlighting the location of the big well is a crumpled mass on the ground. From a personal perspective, thankfully my dad's two sisters who live in Greensburg came were not harmed in the storms, and our nearby relatives are safe. In the larger scheme of personal feelings, I have a sense of profound tragedy and loss. There is no "safe place" anywhere. Nostalgia puts small town America on a special sort of pedestal, but there is no special security there, or anywhere else. As a child visiting Grandma in Greensburg, I remember a tiny little church we attended there. Tiny, in that there were just a couple of older women in attendance. My father and older brothers were called on to conduct the whole program that morning. In later years, the building was no longer used even by a couple of old women, and the tragedy of that demise of a congregation struck me very sharply. As a young man of 18 when I proposed to the young lady who would become my wife the proposal was part of an explanation that I felt a responsibility, a calling if you will, to go to places like Greensburg, KS and help struggling churches. No doubt the town will be rebuilt, and no doubt most of the residents will tough it out and carry on, in awhile. But the town will never be the same. Even when the signs point again to the Big Well, no one will forget the Big Tornado and the night the town was blown away, and everything everyone had built and taken for granted turned into rubble. In the news photos it looks like the grain silos still stand on the edge of Greensburg, while everything around them is devastated. That's what you always see first as you approach Greensburg, or dozens of other little towns on the Kansas prairie. In the midst of destuction that's reassuring in a way. When all is said and done, in an uncertain world with tragedy potentially arising at any moment in time, it's all about the harvest. What's in the barn, what's been saved for the future. Matt 3:12
12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire. (NIV)
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