On Super Tuesday tornados ripped an erratic path of destruction across Tennessee. Operation Blessing showed up on Wednesday and has been helping victims ever since. Today I drove around Sumner and Macon Counties and tried to understand how there could be such utter and complete destruction on one side of the road and absolute normalcy on the other.

I am in my motel room trying to clear my mind and fall asleep, but the stories I heard today are still ringing in my ears. I may as well get up and write down some of what I heard.

The tornados came at night. Most folks I talked with said they were watching TV or settling down. Some were already in bed asleep. One elderly man from Castalian Springs told about how he and his wife huddled in a bedroom closet with arms wrapped around each other, while their 92-year-old neighbor, too scared to seek shelter, stayed in her bed and like a frightened child, pulled the covers over her head.

A large woman with strong arms started to cry when she told about bear-hugging her little boy, but that the terrible wind wrenched him from her arms, then stopped just in time.

A young man with kind eyes told an OBI staffer how his fiancée was crushed and killed, but that somehow, her baby flew through the air and landed safely. While they talked, friends sifting through the wreckage found the missing engagement ring. Our OBI staff cried with the group and prayed with them.

A 25-year-old horse named Simon that was trained to bow his head as his master tipped his hat, disappeared in the storm and went missing for a day… then somehow turned up at the vet with lots of cuts and blind in one eye. Scenes from the Wizard of Oz flashed in my mind as I listened.

The lady postmaster thanked us over and over for sending our bobcat to clear debris from the flattened post office, and told us how so many people were blessed when their soggy mail, containing things like car titles, marriage licenses and checks were salvaged.

There was a man who thought it was “the end of the world” when the tornado tore through and the whole sky turned an angry red as the Columbia Gulf Natural Gas pumping station blew up and caught fire. The power was off, so he had no way of knowing why the whole sky was red. He called his pastor and asked if the rapture was happening; the pastor said…“Maybe.”

OBI’s teams are helping the hard-working people of Macon and Sumner Counties. I’m up past my bedtime, haunted by what I’ve seen and heard, racking my brain for ways to raise more money so we can help even more. Tune in tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 10:25 am and is filed under North America, US. Tornadoes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.