Held

There's something to be said for Christian radio. I'll admit, I'm never aching to listen to it when I jump in the car. But somewhere on the way from Minneapolis to Joplin to Atlanta and back I really began to appreciate the consistency that Christian stations brought to my interstate commute. I could always count on that one station when I'd had enough of flipping through the rest.

On the Present:Hope Tour's first century day, it was my day to drive, and I'd had enough. I lingered on a local Christian station, debating whether or not I could hold out any longer. The song started slow and was neither stellar nor awful. But as the music gained momentum, the lyrics suddenly struck a chord in me.

To preface these lyrics, I should explain that tornadoes are a whole new animal that I had hardly ever encountered before. I'd seen the photos. But I'd never stood in the middle of a tornado's legacy like we did in Joplin. And I'd never had the privilege of hearing so many personal stories of living through a tornado. 

We heard how a woman lost the house surrounding her, the house in which she had raised all her children, but how she was spared along with all her scrapbook memories of her house which happened to be in her car that day. We heard how a family clung to a mattress and was relocated, mattress and all, by the tornado, with the exception of one child who was found rolled up and alive in someone else's rug. We heard how a man lost his wife due to injuries sustained during the tornado but how the man's faith remains strong and how he is staying present in the lives of other families who have suffered loss. What I heard that day in Joplin was what I heard just a few days later on the radio:

It was as if I could hear each of their voices singing that song to me as I drove. This is what it means to be held. And that was the story that we carried to Atlanta. That for many families in Joplin and Tuscaloosa, the sacred was torn from their lives and everything had fallen. And it hurt. But there is so much more to the story. There is hope.