If You’re The Praying Sort, Please Pray For Corpus Christi. And Read This For Some Perspective.

I have a friend on Facebook who often writes amazingly eloquent, heartstring-tugging posts on his page, and no matter how often I ask him if I can quote/credit him, he insists that I am welcome to use his words, but he wants to remain anonymous. He used to live in Texas, which is currently taking a beating from Hurricane Harvey.

Here’s what he wrote this evening:

On 29 October 1998, Hurricane Mitch made landfall in Honduras, and spent the subsequent four days meandering across Central America, finally returning to sea on 1 November and reorganizing as an eastbound tropical storm that struck Florida before final dissipation. In those four days, Mitch deluged the terrain with about 35 inches of rain — 18 inches in some places, a possible 75 in others. We will never know the latter for sure, because all the rain gauges washed away and everyone there died. There were a lot of dead after Mitch. There were eleven thousand dead across ten countries. Some of them drowned as floods overtook them. Some of them perished as winds hurled lethal debris. Some of them died more agonizing deaths as basic services like water, food, medicine, and electricity disappeared and they succumbed to elements or disease. Some of them were buried alive, crushed or suffocated as mountains slipped away into avalanches of mud and slurry upon unsuspecting villages. We saw one from a distance days later: my battalion of US Army engineers bivouacked in a farmer’s field, and it was pointed out to me by the S-3’s senior NCO. There, that brown smudge on the mountainside — there is a whole town underneath. All those people, every mother, father, child, animal, hope, and dream, entombed forever.

 

I saw a lot more like that in the ensuing months: homes and communities gouged out of the landscape, great valleys scoured out of small streambeds, toppled homes, wrecked crops, downed bridges, ripped roadbeds, debris, destruction. The buried village stood in for it all.

 

Eleven thousand dead.

 

It was the most powerful and deadly hurricane in over two hundred years. Mitch was a Category 5, it’s true, but that’s not what did it. What did it was the storm’s stately progression and the rain. Four days of rain. Thirty-five inches of rain. We think of hurricanes first as harbingers and monsters of the wind, and they are that, but their most deadly aspect is the water. I have seen it. And so did the numberless innocents who never expected that days of Biblical flooding would consume them and their memories in a massacring deluge.

 

Mitch: Cat 5, four days, 35 inches.

Harvey: Cat 4, five days, 35 inches.

 

That’s what’s predicted. That’s why, if you’re the praying sort, you should pray for Texas — and especially Corpus Christi — now.

Please pray.  For Corpus Christi – and for every part of Texas affected by this beast of a storm.