Post 14 will be different.

So, just to get it over with:
Today I ate 2,958 calories, 458 over goal.  I weighed in as well and lost 6 pounds.

However, after my day, this all seems so secondary.

Today, I went to Joplin with 27 other people.  We left at about 7:15 am and once we got where we were supposed to be (Samaritan's Purse), it was 1:30 pm.

We were given a brief orientation and given the address of our working location.  We met our SP team leader.

Then we packed back in our cars.  We drove just a few miles through a "normal" street.  You know the kind, car dealers, restaurants, stores, hair salons.  Houses just off the main road.  Very quaint.

Then, as we topped the hill on Ridge Line Road, going south, it hits me.  Like a 2 by 4 in the forehead.  As far as I can see to the left and right - destruction, chaos, trees with metal and clothes in them instead of leaves.  Car's flipped over, the windows busted out.  Then I fully realize what I'm seeing.  Until now I never had a mental image for the word desolation.

We get to our first house.  It's owned by an older lady but she's injured and her sister and son are there to give direction.  He looks at us and says "If it isn't jewelry or a keepsake, it's probably garbage."  We start hauling broken wood, twisted metal, broken glass to the curb.

Another volunteer and I head upstairs after an hour.  We see wood, piled randomly.  Books and shampoo bottles poking out here and there.  No outer walls and no roof at all.  I ask what we are looking at.  He says "Three ustairs bedrooms and a bathroom."  We start looking for items, anything we can salvage to keep.  We find very little.

After a few hours at the first home, we head to the second.  The longer we work, the more I realize we're calling "it" names: "rubble", "debris", "trash", "stuff".  It dawns on me that "it" is none of those things.  These items, this wood, that glass... that is this persons home.  I stifle tears as I work.

I didn't use work gloves.  I played it off like I didn't need them, but really I didn't want them.  I didn't want anything to stop me from touching anything that this chaos had destroyed.  I wanted my skin to touch the destruction, my sweat to move the heartache out of these people's broken homes.  I wanted cuts on my hand (and I got a very small one) to prove that this event was more than a news story to talk about at work, that these were living, working, breathing human beings whose lives had been turned upside down in a matter of minutes.

Then, as suddenly as we began, we quit.  We went to a car and signed a Bible for each family for Samaritan's Purse to present.  Then, I was blessed beyond words. 

These people, these poor broken people, who God loves more than I understand... had HOPE.  They had JOY.  I didn't understand.  This should beat these people down, make them want to give up.  That's what I would probably be tempted to do.  But they didn't!  God be praised, they plan to rise from the destruction, shake their fist at the enemy and come through this with a better home than before, with a better grasp on the really important things in life.  As the man from the second house said "This isn't my property anyway, it's HIS!"

Tears streaming yet again, please understand that no matter what your relationship with God, to see this utter and complete chaos and have people smile and thank us for working on their things, literally looking for any scrap that they can take with them to their new home, proves (again) to me that God exists, that He loves us beyond measure and that He always has been and always will be in control.