clean up time

The waters have subsided in Brisbane and the brown slick mud trail remains like the calling card of a giant watery snail.  As people try to understand and pick up the pieces I went out yesterday and started helping with the clean up - with thousands of others in Brisbane - so many that the roads were jammed obstructing the trucks from the army and the council.  Our church organised teams, provided child care for people who wanted to go and help and became a 'control central'.  We may have even needed a big map of Brisbane with little cars on it being pushed around with long sticks.

It is hard to explain feelings at the moment - a kind of 'survivor guilt' that our house is completely fine and I am doing routine things like the washing and having people over for dinner - a slight nausea that I think is from accidentally swallowing some river mud yesterday - a deep compassion for the people who have lost houses and lives - an admiration for our leaders Anna Bligh and Campbell Newman as they steer our state through a disaster.  I keep walking around our house making inventories - "I would keep that, I could lose that, I could buy some more of that, I would be sad if that went" - but you don't often get to make those choices in a flood or a fire.

Yesterday I helped two families at Karalee whose houses were underwater.  Someone described today as being like the houses were in a slow cooker, and everything was just falling off like meat off the bone.  It is a good description.  I was shovelling stuff out of one man's house and I couldn't even tell what it was - CDs, books, clothes, papers, bits of chipboard - it was all covered in brown mud and slime.  In the second house I helped at the water came up to his second floor window - so we packed up a lot of the higher stuff to take to his daughter's house and ripped up his carpets.  He told me the story of how he had to swim his horses out as the flood waters rose, and he pointed out the horses standing nervously in a higher paddock watching all the activity in the street.

It makes you wonder again about suffering.  If God is good why do bad things happen?  There are no easy answers at all.  It is a creation groaning and crying.  It is a world screaming and sobbing.  What I do know is that 'the Lord is King, He's gonna look after everything, every single thing' - and I can't see the bigger picture.  We talked about Job this morning - a man who lost everything but refused to curse God.  He chose to praise.  I hope we can show love and praise as well.

Cleaning up at Karalee

 My newly purchased gumboots came in handy

 The pile out the front of the house