Someone spoke at church today about her family’s reunion held in Thailand a few years back; they’d originally booked four days on the beach, but after they’d been there a day or two, decided, you know, we’d really like to go to church; where’s the nearest?…
And so they’d left that hotel in Phuket. After they got safely further north, they felt a bump that was the earthquake that triggered the tsunami.
The hotel they’d just been in was gone.
I told the speaker afterwards of my encounter with my neighbor who had just spent a month driving relief trucks for the Red Cross after what was, for her, too, supposed to be a family vacation in an exotic spot. How my neighbor, in the aftermath, was going from being intensely needed and involved and actively participating in the helping and in the grieving, to being home, where–nobody knew.
And somehow just in that moment as she stepped out of that car from the airport, I went outside to check my mailbox and saw her and went over to welcome her, having no idea where she’d been on her trip or why she’d been gone so long. She threw her arms around me and sobbed the whole story.
It was easier to bear now: someone here knew.
And now that woman at church knows my neighbor knows what it was like to be there in Thailand on that day, someone in this city knew that beach too, someone right here loved those people and wonders and cares about them still.
Someone else knows.
And that is an inherently comforting thing.