We thought the gully might never heal. Up until then, we’d believed wind couldn’t stoop so low as to dig the heart out of our safe places, tossing concrete foundations into the sky like a monster looking for lost things. But that day changed us, when hundreds of tornadoes feasted on our towns and dragged our people through stories filled with weeping and shock.
The country road home hugs a mountainside and its shoulders slump into steep gullies on both sides. That day, though, I topped the hill and rounded a curve where tall trees once peeked over the highway from far below, and was suddenly somewhere I thought I’d never been before. For just a second, I thought I’d taken a wrong turn.
Every tree was twisted and limbless, snapped with tell-tale signs we southerners know, from when wind attacks until all lies helpless and bare, unrecognizable. The hidden caves were like exposed navels to unwelcome eyes, and debris lay everywhere the violence touched. The landscape was covered in mud, like dried blood, and we knew we’d never be the same, because now, we knew what was possible.
We had let our guard down. Now we knew we had to protect the low places too, the places we once thought were not worth the wind’s time to ravage in its hurry.
It’s been almost a decade, but now when you drive that highway, no one slows to survey the devastation, because it’s long disappeared into new growth. The gully has healed with strong new trees, and no one would ever suspect there’s a forest’s grave below. But we know better now. Our children know better, and while we live in view of the sun’s glint kissing the reaching leaves that live there now, we remember what is possible, so it doesn’t happen again. We have a greater respect for how quickly life can change. And we’ve taught the next generation what to watch for, and how to build back stronger.
Today at lunch with a cheek full of cheeseburger, I mumbled to Daddy that the nation’s landscape is changing. He helped build it and protect it in America’s military, along with most of the men in our family his age and older, and many of our friends. He didn’t hesitate.
Daddy’s blue eyes were smiling, and I was searching them, waiting for wisdom. He said, “Things have been much, much worse, and we’ve come through just fine.” He was talking about Vietnam, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Freedom has flirted with power with shades-of-gray sordidness before, but freedom is a gift from our Creator. History won’t tell it right, but the landscape will. It will heal, and if anyone wants to know about the scars, we’ll tell them.
Until then, we’ll raise our children to not be indifferent. We have to teach them how to pray, that their gifts are for such a time as this—this moment in history right before faith begins to regrow, and our nation is born again.
~
All the ends of the earth will remember and return to the Lord. All the families of the nations will come and worship Him.
~ Psalm 22:27