It was hard reading the paper this morning in the aftermath of Haiti’s devastating earthquake. All those desperate people, feeling safer outside in the streets for fear that whatever buildings remained standing would crumble in the aftershocks.
I looked closely at the photographs, studying each tired face, knowing there was surely someone that person loves who was hurt, or worse, or who is not accounted for yet. And I ache for the people right here and all across the country who are waiting to hear word from family and friends in Haiti. Waiting and worrying and praying. Like my co-worker, Philip.
I can’t help thinking about the long days and weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit my hometown of New Orleans in 2005. When I turned on the TV to check the coverage at night, I couldn’t seem to turn it off. The pictures, all that damage, those displaced people… Sometimes my mind played tricks on me and everybody I saw on the screen looked familiar.
Sure I love to go home during happy times like weddings and Mardi Gras and the birth of a new niece or nephew. But when I miss home the most is during the hard times. That’s when it hurts to be so far away. And that’s when we want to send in our place the love and protection of angels.
Perhaps that’s why I was so taken with the people in those photographs this morning. They were as familiar to me as my own family, and I will be praying just as hard for angels to surround them.
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Colleen Hughes is the editor-in-chief of ANGELS ON EARTH magazine, a GUIDEPOSTS publication. She’s been at GUIDEPOSTS for 20 plus years, and lives in a Hudson River town with her two daughters and two cats.
