Hurricane Katrina: A spontaneous reflection

Another gutted home in Pascagoula sits alone under a spectacular afternoon sky.

It has been 139 days, 10 hours, 40 minutes and 54 seconds since the water started flooding in around our front door, bubbling up through the slab, and gurgling back through the plumbing. Not that I've really been keeping track or anything....

It feels like an eternity has passed since that moment -- yet at the same time it feels like it was only yesterday. Time is all befuzzled here.

Hurricane Katrina. I wonder sometimes just how much the rest of the world tires of hearing her name. It's different for us -- you see we sort of knew her personally. If I stop and dig deep at what the name signifies for me I realize that I don't think of a hurricane... I think of a particular moment in time when the entire world changed. Not just for us, no. Not our world only. I meant what I said: the entire world changed. Perhaps we're simply the first ones to be aware of it, but I can assure you that it happened.

There was a moment that morning when the wave crashed through our city when I was the only person on earth. I was alone with my God. We exchanged no words - but I understood.

I can't tell you why or how - but I can tell you this... I truly feel this change will be a change for the better. I know, I know -- it's insane to say such things amid all the despair and destruction.. But deep down - I feel it. It could just be the post traumatic stress disorder coupled with my previous unhealthy sense of optimism talking... but I can't be sure. I truly believe something wonderful will come of this.

We get a taste of it now and then... The help that poured in from around the country and around the world in those first few weeks.. The Mormons volunteering to clean out our Catholic church. The Mennonites working long hours to restore our sheetrock . The elementary school students in Wisconsin who worked so hard to raise all of that money just to send it to us. The countless volunteers I have met day after day who took time from their lives to travel to places they couldn't even pronounce just to lend a hand or a shoulder to cry on. People like Mary Gray of Minnesota Helpers who I know has lost almost as much sleep over all of this as those of us living down here.

Those days of isolation following the storm - when we were cut off from the rest of the world... Back then the world seemed so huge and we seemed so insignificant -- a speck in the cosmos. Now though I get the sense that the whole place shrunk like a cotton t-shirt washed in hot water. Do you have any idea how very unsettling it is for your world-view to change so significantly in such a relatively short period of time?

Just remember though -- the entire world changed that day. Your world as well as mine.