SubscribeDealing with your new normal
Sometimes life crashes in on us with such force that it changes our normal way of being. That’s what happened five years ago in New Orleans. Charles Evans was trapped at the New Orleans Convention Center with thousands of other desperate New Orleans residents following Hurricane Katrina.
Then age 9, Charles touched my heart when he stared into the camera and declared: “We just need some help out here. It’s so pitiful.”
I saw Charles again today on television. The 14-year-old told NBC broadcaster Lester Holt that Hurricane Katrina was “like a scary movie that I would not want to see again.”
Some 1,800 people died after hurricane-swirled waters crashed through levees and flooded 80 percent of the city. Hundreds of thousands people were displaced, businesses were destroyed and many people left for places far away.
Holt told viewers that he returned to New Orleans on the fifth anniversary of Katrina to see if life had gotten back to normal. For many, many people there, it hasn’t and it won’t. Many have had to deal with a new normal.
I met a family of four nearly five years ago who moved to Savannah after Hurricane Katrina destroyed their home and their lives as they knew them there. They were blessed to meet people in Savannah who helped them get settled and find work. Now that family is doing well and enjoying their new city. They have no plans of returning to New Orleans.
Charles says he wishes “that things would kind of be back to normal” in his city, but he recognizes that may not happen. “New Orleans is not back to normal,” he said. “You know, a lot of people may think that it is, but it is not.”
In the five years since Hurricane Katrina, thousands of people in different parts of the country and the world also have had to deal with natural and man-made disasters that have upended the normal flow of their lives. What use to be isn’t anymore for so many people due to hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes eruptions, snow storms, terrorist’s attacks, mine collapses and oil rig explosions. Floods in Pakistan from month-long monsoon rains have claimed the lives of nearly 1,700 and left homeless millions more. And the rains and the floods are continuing to bring calamity. (Photo from the Associated Press)
What happened in New Orleans five years ago, which was captured in all its misery and despair on television, was unimaginable. But since then, so are the disasters in Haiti and more recently Pakistan. We are not living in normal times.
While our personal storms may not compare with what Charles and millions of others have suffered and are suffering, some of us have encountered some our own earth-shattering events that have caused us to rethink at times how we continue to live our lives. Deaths of loved ones, lost of mortgages, job terminations, children in trouble, illnesses, divorce, to name a few.
I have learned that when my normal has been upset to turn quickly in prayer to the one person that is constant. God is unchanging. Faith in Him is the only way that I can deal when my way of living, thinking and doing has been turned upside down. When I trust in God, I don’t as easily lapse into wishing that things would be like they use to be. Instead, I look forward in hope for something much better than before.
How did you deal with the seismic changes in your life? What lessons, if any, have you learned from observing what happned in New Orleans about dealing with life-altering disaster?
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