Heartbreaking ...

[Photos from here]

I'm so sad for my state right now. 123 killed so far in Joplin, Missouri. 1,500 still unaccounted for. Hospital nearly in ruins. A Walmart & a Home Depot in ruins. Think of all the people that were there, just before 6:00 PM on a Sunday evening. Tornados are ugly, ugly, ugly. When we were in St. Louis over Easter weekend, there was one. The airport suffered some damage & was closed for a day. The day it opened, the kids & I flew out of there back to KC. The drive to the airport there was surreal. Neighborhoods just leveled. Tree trunks without branches & leaves. Creepy.  But the damage & deaths in Joplin is even more widespread.

The kids are almost out of school for the summer ... and so today I did a lot of projects around the house. I hung some things up in our bedroom that have been waiting patiently for months. I went out & planted a couple more strawberry plants. I popped in a thrift store on my way to get some groceries & got the cutest mustard colored pot for the aloe plant in my kitchen. I also finished putting away my bargains I got at Target on Sunday.

Several times today, I had the thought "this wouldn't have mattered". This thought was reminiscent of when Kyle & I lived on North Padre Island & there were threats of a hurricane. After you board up & evacuate your house, you think of all those little things you've done - inside & out of your home. And they suddenly do not matter. Back in 2005, I remember thinking "all those knobs I changed out on all the cabinets, all those updates here & there, the landscaping I worked hard on - they will not matter." Luckily, we were spared from a hurricane when we lived there - but I still remember some of those thoughts I had at the time. So today, with the devastation in Joplin [just 150 miles away], I find myself again telling me some of this "stuff" just doesn't matter. All those red sticker bargains at Target. My cute new thrift store pot. My garden I've invested a lot of time & money into the past couple of weeks. The new wall decs finally hanging in our bedroom. Someone was probably doing all this on Sunday in Joplin. And now, just as long as their friends & family are accounted for ... that is the only thing that matters.

Yesterday I had a friend taking stuff to a collection center, so I quickly raced through our drawers, bedroom closets & bathroom closets to augment the "donation" bag that was already out in the garage waiting to be hauled off somewhere. Then today I got an e-mail that our school & parish is making a delivery down there to Joplin & were in need of some specific items [bottled water, baby blankets, socks & underwear]. After I dropped off Brett at baseball practice, I took the other 2 with me to the store where we picked out a package of socks for every age group & gender combo there is: babies, girls, boys, women & men. I tried to visualize the type of person that would be getting them ... What happened to them? Their house? Do they only have the 1 pair of socks that they had on? Did they need socks? Do they like the ones I got? Am I buying the ones I would want, if it were me? Are they thinking I'm a cheapskate? Where are they picking these up from? Will they be getting 20 pairs of socks or just 1? Please tell me companies just donate thousands  of their socks in cases like this? Do girls this age wear these kind of fold-over socks? It's summer ... do they even need socks? Maybe I should be getting underwear? All over SOCKS. I think I just wanted my purchase to be perfect - I wanted these darn socks to make everything better for them. And I know they won't. 

Please say a prayer for healing, recovery, for the losses, to find the missing & for those who have nothing, but can not even begin to start anew.