On Seeing

I had spent the last week hearing stories from the safety of my home, leaving only to drop off and pick up our son from school. A journey which usually took ten minutes round trip, had grown to an hour and a half because vehicles that would have normally used a variety of roads, were down to one or two main roads to get into town. We were all using the same road.

While organising generously donated food items, kitchen equipment, blankets, clothing and bedding that would be distributed to people in our community affected by the floods, I had heard stories. A family whose house had collapsed while they were inside; I knew of areas who had gone 7 days without water and electricity, I had prepared food and blankets for families who had waded out off their houses waist deep in water, carrying children on their shoulders. We had acted as a safe-house for a family who were worried their wall would fall on them in the night, and our car was used to pass on countless loads of needed goods as well as gallons of donated water to others.

But I hadn’t seen.

Not really, I had experienced the inconvenience of a longer commute, a few ceiling drips and a few days without tap water.

I had been watching the news, I had seen photos and shocking videos of people, houses and vehicles being swept away by rivers of brown water.

But I hadn’t seen, not really.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday morning, the bright sunshine tried to mask the devastation. (I know I’m over-using the word at the moment, but it is what it is, Devastation). The boot of our car was loaded to deliver water to a community we have been working with for over five years. James had done the trip before to deliver cooked hot meals, food, blankets and clothing, but I needed to see what had happened, because I hadn’t really understood, not yet.

Yesterday I saw.

I saw that where before there was a road leading into a community, there was a river, the road wasn’t there anymore. The only access point was a fjord-like piece of fast flowing water. Arriving at the edge of the crossing, people would take off their shoes and wade through. Some walked straight through in flip flops, young children on their shoulders, crates of bread on their heads, buckets of water balanced in hands. They climbed over boulders the size of small trucks which had appeared in their thousands and scattered the landscape with their presence.

The main road that ran along-side the river was full of, (and my civil engineer father would be disappointed with me), ‘holes’ that looked like a child had come along with a biscuit cutter and randomly made patterns and holes wherever they pleased. Bridges were impassable, swathes of water had left one side cut-off from the other. Communities separated from each other, schools, inaccessible, the ability to get to work thwarted.

There was a sunken car outside a house. There were many sunken houses. Pieces of corrugated metal used in roofing were scattered around like discarded confetti, the foundation slab of a house was left – the entire contents and building swept away by a force of water never seen here. Houses tilting, cracked and precariously balancing as if mid dance.

Then I started to hear.

“The water took everything.” “We are left with nothing.”

It seemed that in this area the water had shown no partiality to what it swept away as it created new paths and redefined the landscape. I heard how people, children, families and the entire contents of houses were swept away, many still unaccounted for. I saw the boulders that had terrorised and crushed. I can’t get those rocks out of my head; it doesn’t seem possible that rocks of that size and quantity could have moved and yet they did.

I saw.

I hope that I never un-see; because seeing enables me to love more deeply and respond to need. It allows me to fall before my Father’s feet and weep for those he created and love; to see the desperation in the devastation and be grateful for my own inconvenience, it enables me to be His hands and feet even when it doesn’t quite suit me. Seeing means that I have no excuse not to respond, and that wherever I am, I can use the resources I’ve been given to do so.

May I never stop really seeing.