A Tribute to Some Hurting Folks

Having spent my entire childhood in the tiny southeastern Kansas town of Oswego, I'm feeling nothing but sympathy for all those folks in the Midwest who have been and continue experiencing the devastating tornados we currently keep hearing about on the TV news reports. Fortunately, my family and I never suffered the direct effects of one of those disasters. We, however, did have a number of close calls.

Nothing was more eerie for me as a young boy than to watch those horrible black clouds building across the sky on a hot afternoon, then have the wind suddenly die off to nothing and all sounds of nature become silent. It was as though night had descended upon us. And then would come that unnerving whaling of the town's siren atop the McKinney Ford Motor Company building, warning everyone of impending danger--usually that a tornado had been spotted, and it was heading in our general direction.

Mom, my brother, and I would wait nervously for Pop's ol' pickup to come down the road and turn into our driveway. Once he arrived, we would all hustle inside the house and take refuge in what we considered the safest spot. And in the years after we all became Christians, we would join in prayer for everyone's safety. Eventually, the all-clear siren would sound, and we would come out of our refuge spot and wait for the weather to calm.

I remember one occasion when a tornado passed through the farm belonging to one of Pop's good friends. The friend ended up with a lifelong memento from the tornado: an egg with a piece of straw driven through the middle of it by the force of the wind.

In later years, after my brother and I had grown up and moved away, our folks would keep telling us about other close calls they had experienced. One that I'll never forget was the time Mom and Dad decided to get on the floor and turn the sofa over on them for protection. The only problem was that they both were so elderly at the time that they couldn't climb out from under the sofa afterward. It was only because some neighbors came checking on them that they finally were freed from their predicament.

Mom and Dad no longer have to worry about tornados and such--they've both been gone for several years. However, I still have relatives and friends who reside in the Midwest, so I do get concerned about their safety during these times, just like they get concerned about us if a hurricane starts this way. And I can't begin to tell you how sorry I feel for those folks who lost children today in the tornado that flattened a Moore, Oklahoma elementary school. The same sentiment goes for anyone who has lost family members and/or friends of any age in such disasters. My heart goes out to all of them.