As I am writing this, we are anxiously watching Hurricane Milton as it heads to Florida. My Mother-in-law lives in the Tampa Bay/Sarasota area in a mobile home. She is sheltering with Karen’s brother, who has a block house, but we are very worried about that whole bay area, and we have about a dozen of other friends on that west coast and hundreds in Orlando, where it will still likely be a Category 1 when it goes through. So many of them have debris lined up by the street from the last hurricane that have the potential to become projectiles in this one.
I lived in Florida for almost 20 years and I have seen my share of hurricanes; they are unpredictable, loud as a freight train and they ALWAYS seem to be strongest in the middle of the night, after the electricity has been knocked out. When my kids were younger, they remember playing board games by candlelight as we all slept on the mattresses that we moved into our living room, to be as far as possible from vulnerable windows. They remember filling up our bathtub with water in case we lost clean water and heating up cans of ravioli on the grill. To be clear, they were scary and anxiety-inducing and left us in a very vulnerable position.
I am incapable of not thinking about these things theologically. I do NOT believe that God creates hurricanes to punish anyone; they are an act of weather that has intensified due to climate change. I do not believe that prayer will move the hurricane away from my loved ones; and if it did, that would just mean it would move to someone else’s loved ones. I do not believe that prayer will restore electricity sooner, keep water uncontaminated, or clear up downed trees sooner; that is the act of hundreds of committed humans who work tirelessly to restore some sort of normalcy.
Here is what I will be praying for. I pray that the storm will impact as few humans as possible; ideally, it avoids the Tampa Bay/Sarasota area which is one of the most populated areas in Florida. I pray that people will take personal responsibility to move from harm or stay out of harm afterwards. I will be sending peace and calming energy to my loved ones to counter the anxiety that they will be feeling. I hope that people will come together to help each other in kind, patient and neighborly ways, and I will pray that our governments all around the world take climate change more seriously so that I don’t have to pray for those in the path of hurricanes as often as we have to now.