Remembering How We Overcame the Storm

On Monday, October 28, 2013, at 6pm, there will be a Commemoration of Hurricane Sandy here in Perth Amboy.  It will take place where High Street ends at Sadowski Parkway, where the gazebo used to stand before the Storm took it.  The Service of Prayer will be concluded with a candlelight march to the Waterfront where the storm damage can be seen, even a year later.

It has been one year.  How have our lives changed?  Or is the better question to ask, how did our lives change, but now how have they changed back?  Because, let’s face it, even though Perth Amboy was one of the seven worst affected communities in Middlesex County, we were not on the front lines.

We were not on the front lines in our community.  The storm surge wiped out along the harbor.  The pictures of what was dug out from the bottom of Bayview Park still give me chills.  But up here, we had wind, lost electricity, but no water got in. 

We were not on the front lines in this community.  Sayreville and South River have neighborhoods being bought out so that the houses can be torn down in anticipation of the next one.  And the storm pounded on Monmouth and Ocean Counties in ways we were spared. 

Staten Island and Sandy Hook stood as sentinels, taking beatings to protect us inland.  But the last year has brought profound changes for me in ways I never would have imagined.

It has been a most profound education in the dynamics of recovering after something that reminds us how trivial human beings are in the grand scheme of Planet Earth.  Trivial?  I pick the word deliberately.  We can build as much as we want, expand as much as we want, pillage and destroy as much as we want, but we are still at the mercy of powers we cannot even begin to understand, much less control. 

So what do we do, one year later?  Thank the Lord there hasn’t been another confluence of events this year.  We aren’t ready. 

So what do we do, one year later?  Prepare, prepare, prepare.  When or where or how is the next one going to come?  It is the voice of one crying in the wilderness to a world that doesn’t want to listen.  We’ve slipped back into complacency.

I invite everyone to join us on Monday evening for the Commemoration of the Storm.  Because we will be celebrating the power of God.  And I am not talking about the power of the Hurricane.  Because the power of God is not expressed in the storms that strike, nor the earthquakes, nor the volcanoes, nor the disasters either natural or manmade. 

No, the power of God is what infuses God’s people to overcome the power of the Hurricane.  In the grand scheme of creation, the power of the human being is ultimately trivial against the power of the Storm.  But in the aftermath, the power of the human being slips.  The façade of strength we put up comes down when we see real power. 

And when that façade comes down, the power of God can enter in.  Then the trivial power of the human being becomes the magnified power of humanity in relationship with our Maker. 

Were it that such power could be mobilized without the intervention of a disaster.