Blog Rewind - April 28, 2007

A few weeks ago, I re-posted my first-ever blog post from 2007.  I wasn't on Blogger at the time, but I saved the old posts and decided to celebrate my blogging birthday by reviewing some of those first year's writings.

The following was posted on April 28, 2007 - four years ago today.  It is titled "36 Years and 18 days", and I'll let it stand for itself, no further explanation needed.

36 Years and 18 Days

At 36 years and 18 days of age, a man I wish today could be standing beside me was taken from this world. I carry his name, as does his grandson, who shares far more personality traits with his grandfather than he will ever know.

I was 13 at the time, almost 14. Losing the benefit of a father at that tender age is sobering, and daunting. A young man suddenly has thrust upon him the responsibilities of manhood; with no more footprints to follow.

So many years ago another man's 36th year & 18th day brought just another day. The day started by letting his son sleep a little later than normal, choosing to run the son's morning paper route on his own. As that day pushed back the previous night over his head, he made the rounds flipping papers onto little old ladies' porches so they wouldn't have to walk out to the street to get it. He visited friends and family that day while his son was in school. Later in the afternoon as his son was cutting grass, an alarm was sounded about town - FIRE! A conflagration had erupted, and this man along with many others had answered the calling to protect his neighbors. He saw his son that day, just once as that building burned violently. His son asked him a simple question, to which he shook his head with a simple "no" as he rounded the corner. Minutes later, with father and son no more than a few yards apart, the building finally gave in to the wishes of gravity and fell.

For me, my 36th year and 18th day is April 30, 2007.  How will my 36th year and 18th day start? Will there be anything different? More importantly, how will the next day, 36 and 19 start? How will it feel to be older than the greatest man I ever knew? How strange will it be?

Where are the faint traces of old, worn footprints for me to follow?

Easter...

(Written while listening to to Nearer, My God, To Thee...click and listen, especially to the last verse beginning at 3:30.  Wow, just plain wow...)

What does Easter mean, to you?  Is it a spring holiday?  Is it sharing time with friends and family, maybe a small family reunion?

Go back a couple thousand years, consider the events of a week in Jerusalem.  A man - proclaiming himself to be the King of the Jews and challenging the religious establishment that had lasted hundreds if not thousands of years - this man entered the city on a donkey.  This peasant carpenter's son though, had the religious leaders scared.  He healed people.  He proclaimed himself as the living water, the bread of life, the Son of God.  Blasphemous!  How dare He say such things.  He must be silenced, the leaders thought.  They plotted, schemed.  But the people knew that this carpenter was no peasant.  He offered something refreshing, a new covenant.  They had seen the miracles with their own eyes.  Lazarus was alive, lepers were clean and healed, blind could see because of this Bethlehem carpenter.  He had a following, and people believed in him.  How could they not, with what they had seen?  Until now, they had lived under generations of Mosaic law.  That same prophets that gave them law also told of a messiah.  The people recognized this carpenter as that Messiah...He was the real deal for them.  But He presented a direct challenge to the "establishment" and those in power.  Their self-interest in preserving that power clouded their ability to see who He really is.

The people were rejoicing in His coming to Jerusalem.  They wanted Him to challenge the religious leaders.  They expected Him to overthrow their rule and establish His kingdom.  He would, not as people expected though.  He would, just as prophecy said He would.

In days, the people would see the drama shift from a triumphal entry into the city to that of a horror of mockery, torture, humiliation and death.  The promise would be stripped bare, beaten to near death (link to medical article written by a Mississippi physician), then sent on a forced march through the city to a rocky outcrop near the edge of town.  He would have nails driven through his wrists and feet, hoisted high upon a cross for the entire town to witness, then left to die between two thieves.  But even then, he challenged the religious establishment by telling one thief that they would be in Paradise together that very day.  When He breathed his last though, people knew this was no charismatic carpenter, nor was he the local psychotic.  The sky went black, the earth trembled beneath the city.  Even the religious leaders had to ask themselves what they had unleashed when the great temple's veil into the Holy of Holies was torn from the top down.

But....the witnesses were human.  They saw Him die.  Dead, just like the two thieves beside Him.  The healer, the miracle worker was gone.  The hope they had quickly faded.  His followers hid in fear their own lives would be demanded next by the religious leaders.  Hope was gone.  It was finished.

But had they forgotten the prophecies?  The leaders hadn't...they posted guards at His grave, just to make sure.

A couple of days later, because there hadn't been enough time to prepare His body, some ladies went to the tomb.  I can imagine it was like going back to the grave of one of our own loved ones, a few days after a funeral.  A long drive, still grasping for ways to fill the new void in your life.  It's a somber trip, knowing that we'll see the fresh pile of dirt, covered over with flowers from friends.

When the ladies got to the tomb though, they were baffled.  Two people, in radiant white clothing were in the now open tomb.  "What is this, who are you?", the ladies ask.  My sarcastic mind wants to think the two messengers probably looked at each other, rolled their eyes, then looked back at the ladies and said something like, "Are yall really surprised at this?  Didn't He tell you He'd come back from this grave?  Had yall given up on Him that quickly???"

The truth is, we still give up that quickly and easily.  We get "religious" and stuck in our ruts, trying to do the things/actions that others (leaders?) tell us we need to do to be right with the church...etc etc etc.  I could go on....  But the truth is that that New Covenant is ALIVE!  He's waiting for us, He wants us.  He's told us "the time is coming when I will make a new covenant with them...for I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more." (Jeremiah 31)

Don't give up!  Ever!!!  You can't out-sin God.  Nothing you do surprises Him.  All He asks is that you love Him, and put Him first in your life.  Does being saved mean we'll never sin?  HA!  No, we'll sin...it's in our nature.  But He understands.  He really does.....

It's Friday....

A Historical Note...

 

View of Greenville, MS, nine days after the beginning of the 1927 Mississippi River Flood.  Photo from MS Dept of Archives & History Digital Archives

"Levee broke at ferry landing Mounds, Mississippi eight a.m.  Crevasse will overflow the entire Mississippi Delta." ~ those were the dreadful words wired from Army district engineer Major John Lee to General Edgar Jadwin, head of the Army Corps of Engineers, 84 years ago today.  That telegram announced the beginning of the Great Flood of 1927.

While true statistics may never be known, The National Safety Council estimated deaths in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta from the 1927 flood to be near 1,000 people.  185,495 people were directly affected in Mississippi, from Rosedale to Greenwood to Yazoo City and south to Vicksburg.  Almost 42,000 homes were flooded, 22,000 buildings destroyed, and another 62,000 were damaged.

The calamity's genesis was months prior, in the fall of 1926, with torrential recurrent rains falling over the northern Mississippi Valley.  Snowfall that gathered over the winter began to melt with the advance of Spring in 1927, which also brought more rain to the southern Mississippi Valley.  The water was gathering.

The Mounds Landing levee failure, near Scott, MS, was the first of almost 150 levee failures along the Mississippi River.  Geographic scars of the deluge at Mounds Landing are still - although barely - visible.  3000 feet of levee failed, releasing a flow of water estimated to have been twice that of Niagara Falls.  Ultimately, 27,000 square miles of Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas were inundated.  In Mississippi, all of Washington, Sharkey, Humphreys, and Issaquena counties were flooded, along with parts of Bolivar, Sunflower, Leflore, Yazoo, and Warren counties.  At the flood's height, the Mississippi River spread to 60 miles wide (5 to 10 times wider than its current levee boundaries).

Unlike most other natural disasters that dispel most of their energy in one major blow, the Mississippi River never stops.  The flood of 1927 did not "happen" in the span of a day or two.  Flood waters began to recede months later.

As we contemplate our participation in the upcoming New Madrid hazard zone National Level Exercise, we should pause to look to our own history of disasters.  From one disaster to another, we have rebuilt bigger, higher, and better, just as the river engineers did before and after 1927.  Survivors of Mississippi's benchmark hurricane, Camille, fell victim to their own feelings of disaster-resistance 36 years later.  And much like the levee builders did in the early 20th century, much faith was placed in human ingenuity's attempts to control Nature when engineers rebuilt taller and stronger levees around New Orleans after Hurricane Betsy in 1965.  We easily recall human saga that resulted from days of flooding following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.  Yet, has the fog of eight decades blinded us to the months of flooding that occurred in our own Delta area?

The area of Mississippi affected in 1927 still has about the same population, with estimates ranging from 160,000 to 180,000, occupying some 60,000 housing units.  Although the population hasn't changed much in nearly ninety years, a multitude of social aspects have.  On the positive side, our population is more well informed, information travels faster and is more readily available, and we are more mobile.  Armed with information and mobility, we are able to evacuate more easily.  That mobility is a two-edged sword, though; we will want to come home more quickly.  On the negative side, our dependence has grown.

The movement and needs of a great mass of population present challenges to those who graciously open their cities to us; Mississippi isn't known as the Hospitality State by accident.  We bring with us the maladies of a society that is far less prepared, and far less resilient.  While not longing for the severe living conditions of the Delta in the 1920's, our people today are more dependent on others for their health and welfare than were our not-so-distant ancestors.  An organized food industry has turned the family garden plot into basketball courts, swimming pools, and playgrounds; our daily sustenance arrives via truck.  Advanced healthcare has given us the ability to live longer with a host of diseases that once claimed the lives of the young; but it quickly abandons us within the grasp of Death when disaster separates us from our medicine men.  Where we once were dependent largely upon ourselves, have we have now laid that resilience upon the alter of convenience in our current age?

We are accustomed to the pace of our modern life.  Stresses of meeting work, social, and family schedules and demands take their toll on our overall well-being.  That same rapid pace that slowly wears us down also engrains in us a desire to seek quick resolution to disaster's obsticals.  We will want our disaster-disrupted lives to be rapidly returned to normal, with no convenience left out. 

History will be repeated.  The Mississippi Delta will flood again, in spite of our grand efforts to prevent it from ever happening again.  Taller, stronger levees perform their seasonal dance with the Father of Waters, which constrained by those same levees is now allowed to move more quickly and carry more water.  Our own Gulf Coast is rebuilding to match the height of Katrina's storm surge, repeating the phrase heard after Camille that it won't be that bad again.  The New Madrid fault will slip beneath the Mid-South, unleashing a calamity that will rival all of the great disasters of our time.

Are we really that well prepared?  Or are we that forgetful?

Marshally Ramsey - The Storm

Marshall Ramsey is a political cartoonist and news-talk radio host in Jackson, MS.  He has a great talent for capturing the moment in his cartoons - whether it be political drama or human tragedy.  Marshall is equally talented with the pen.  I invite you to read his most recent writing, The Storm.