gone.

I need a hug.

I know that that is uncharacteristically vulnerable of me to say, and I feel bad saying that after a day spent meeting people who need more than a hug. So many of them need a hug, and a home, and a car, and just a pair of shoes.

I went to Joplin today with some people from the church, to find out how we could be most helpful as we look for the most immediate needs after the tornadoes that ripped through on Sunday night.

The devastation is breath-taking. The residential areas hit hardest look like the pictures of war zones in far-off lands that you'd see in newspapers, or history books. Block after block of bombed-out homes. Everything inside of the house, all of the intricacies of your daily life--the cabinet where you keep your medications, and that box of old family pictures you keep in the living room, and your junk drawer of empty tape rolls and rubber bands and chip clips--all exposed, all scattered for everyone to see, when only you understand. They'll never know that you got that chip clip at a charity walk for dogs on the same day that your niece threw up all over your golden retriever. They'll just see it lying there on the sidewalk, maybe pick it up and throw it away with the rest of the debris.

Maybe that all sounds dramatic. But there's something so outrageous about the whole thing. What was in is now out. What was whole is now broken. What was normal life is now so entirely abnormal. So shattered.

As you drive north through Joplin, you pass through the worst of the damage. There's broken glass, and pieces of wood and aluminum everywhere. Entire stores look as though they've had bombs dropped on them, or as though quick-burning fires ripped through their insides, hollowing them out. Emergency crews are out attempting to re-string the power lines. In some sections of town, no business are left intact. Everything's gone. Decimated. There are piles of debris everywhere you look. In the blocks behind the business are residential areas similarly war-torn. We drive over downed power lines, unable to find the right turns because the street signs are knocked down. Cars sit in unnatural places, right up against trees and houses, at odd angles, upside down, and all with the glass blown out of their windows. A dryer sits perched atop a roof--one of the few roofs upon which anything can still be perched. Most of the houses in these neighborhoods are roof-less. The lawns are so littered with debris, there's no grass to be seen. You look right into the house, into a person's bathroom, where four days before the person took a shower in privacy. Now the walls are gone.

As I see all of this I think of the terror of being in the house at the moment at which those walls were taken. It's unfathomable. One family described it like a freight train. I can't imagine.