Still trying to get my head the superstorm and how much it has changed lives along the East Coast. There is suddenly a ton of nostalgia for the Jersey shore, as Governor Chris Christie says that the coastline is forever changed. Looking at images of fire and flooding, you cannot doubt that. Even more, Queens is burning with 100 homes turned into ashes.. reports of fires breaking out throughout the affected region due to gas lines or electric lines.. or who knows what.. The aftermath still isn't fully sinking in. 6.5 million are still without power this morning--and this morning in the Northeast is very cold.. And in West Virginia, it's even colder with feet of snow falling instead of inches, weighing down trees and branches and most certainly causing further power disruptions.. This was a storm for the record books. Did you notice, though, how many storm for the record books are happening lately? Maybe then this storm is simply a harbinger of disaster to come..
Tonight, along many of the towns destroyed and leveled by this storm, were going to have innocent children trick or treat. Those plans are off. Instead, on a night when ghosts and goblins should have been walking the streets, true horror has taken center stage.
The images being seen are unfathomable. Unthinkable.
Consider this: There are massive waves along Lake Erie due to the Superstorm. There were high winds as far as Ohio... This storm struck the entire East Coast, not only the coastline, but inland. More than a dozen states were affected by Hurricane Sandy.
That is monumental. That is amazing.. That is unbelievable.
The 'COMING GLOBAL SUPERSTORM' was a book written by Whitley Streiber and Art Bell late in the 20th century. In the fiction novel based on fact, they claimed earth changes were going to get so severe so quickly that once normal storms would evolve quickly into 'superstorms' with a warm ocean and nothing to stop them. I fondly rememebr Matt Lauer interviewing both Streiber and Bell on the TODAY show about the book, joking about their assertions and mocking the 'superstorm' title as a clever scare tactic.. More than a decade later the 'quickening' of everything seems to be setting in. The superstorm is not coming, but is here.
One year ago in my area, we were slammed with a Halloween snow storm that dumped feet of snow. This year it's a superstorm that has decimated a number of cities, and killed at least 50.
A moving story from my state of Pennsylvania is stuck in my head. A father in Susquehanna County lost his 8-year-old son. The boy was going out to see if the family pets were safe... when his father said to go back in the house, he listened and was killed by a falling tree. The dad was interviewed in my local WNEP-TV news in tears saying he kept his son warm until the responders arrived..
I don't know about you.. There were the nurses in New York City walking in the dark down dozens of stairs with sick premature babies in hand to get them to safety..
Humanity.
Innocence lost.
Heartache and heart break.. Sadness and nostalgia.
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, we were told that was a Hurricane the likes of which we would never see again in our collective lifetime. Maybe that is correct, as the new 'norm' is superstorms..
Did you see any headlines this year from Asia? Probably not. But if you would have you would have known that their typhoons this year were remarkably strong....and killed lots of people in the path of each storm.
There are countless stories of heroism from Sandy the Superstorm. Unfortunately there are also countless amounts of tragedy.
What does this mixture of sadness and goodness mean? What does it say about the existence of God? What doesn't it?
I frankly don't know at all.
Some people will do one of two things in the aftermath: They will either cling to God or resist the idea he exists. And it will be directly due to what they have seen during this storm.
We are products of our surroundings.
As the storm winds down, the surroundings have become truly bleak for millions of people..