surreal
characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtapositions; having an oddly dreamlike quality; very strange or dreamlike; bizarre; not actually such; being or seeming fanciful or imaginary; unreal
Speaking to my friend on the phone, looking through the glass patio doors at beautiful, green grass, sun shining, flowers blooming, our big, beautiful maple tree just outside the door. . .
And across town. . .water rushing out of a subdivision like Niagara Falls.
Surreal. That’s the word I used to describe my feelings. How can this be? On one hand my heart agonizes for the people on the other side of town guessing what fear and anguish they must be experiencing. On the other hand, now that I am back on the “north end,” safely tucked away in our quiet, little neighborhood, it’s like it never happened.
I wasn’t just earlier Saturday morning helping my son get water out of his basement. By the way, what he was dealing with was just a nuisance compared to the tragedy that these other folks were experiencing. Get the water off the basement floor, maybe replace some carpeting, keep that dehumidifier running. Not two feet of water coming through your front door or your basement walls collapsing or not being able to get home or leave home because your access road looks like a picture from Iraq.
I was driving through water that I probably shouldn’t have going for a bigger wet vac, observing houses, churches and businesses with lakes instead of lawns. And I went through before it got bad.
This was before the state of emergency being declared in all the surrounding towns also, water supplies contaminated, and I had never seen the “code red” warnings before, not at least in our community where nothing like this ever happens. Well, according to the news, I guess it did happen similarly 100 years ago.
Surreal – Having an oddly dreamlike quality, unreal, strange, bizarre, seeming fanciful or imaginary.
But it wasn’t. It was real and lives changed in an instant. One friend related to me that as her son and his family were wading through the water from their house to their car parked on the street, abandoning their home, that he thought of Katrina. He told her that one family with two babies was using tubs to float them along to safety.
Unreal. Bizarre. But true.
Everything can change in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye.
Whoosh! Zip! Zing!
Everything different.
1 Corinthians 15:51-52 MSG But let me tell you something wonderful, a mystery I’ll probably never fully understand. We’re not all going to die–but we are all going to be changed. (52) You hear a blast to end all blasts from a trumpet, and in the time that you look up and blink your eyes–it’s over. On signal from that trumpet from heaven, the dead will be up and out of their graves, beyond the reach of death, never to die again. At the same moment and in the same way, we’ll all be changed.
