Priority Shift

I am ADT's target customer. I have always been terrified of burglars, home invasion, fire, etc.--anything threatening my home and belongings. Those commercials with the shadowy figure breaking down the door absolutely terrify me, though I have still not purchased their product. Fortunately, the material thing I'd most hate to lose--my scrapbooks--is not high on the list for most robbers, but the threat of housefire positively terrifies me.

This fear extends to natural disasters as well, especially tornadoes. When I was younger, still in my parents' home, I remember loading the scrapbooks into a laundry basket to take them to the basement with us during tornado warnings. In recent years, our cat, Charlotte, has taken precedence when the sirens blare. We would get her carrier from the garage, load her in, and huddle there with it in the hallway. I remember an evening in November 2005, right after Matt and I got engaged, I was in Davis-Kidd at Green Hills Mall, shopping for a wedding organizer binder, when store employees told everyone there was a tornado warning. They led us back into the cinderblock hallways under the mall. I was unable to reach Matt, and I was nearly in tears, thinking of Charlotte alone in our duplex a couple miles away.

Yesterday, a bad storm system blew across Tennessee, and as you can imagine, scrapbooks and other items were the furthest things from our minds when the weather radio went off repeatedly. Our thoughts were almost entirely on keeping Kate safe. (I say almost because I did shut Charlotte in the bathroom before we fled to the neighbor's basement, though she had escaped by the time we returned home--she has retractable opposable thumbs, we believe.) We held Kate close, ready to cower with our bodies over her, if the dark skies decided to crash down on us.

If you've watched the news at all, you know that the only actual touch-downs in Tennessee were in Murfreesboro, about the same distance southeast of Nashville as we are northwest. Many homes were destroyed, and there were two deaths... a young woman and her nine-week old baby girl. Matt and my heart broke when we heard that. The husband/father is in the hospital with multiple injuries, and Matt says he can't imagine having the will to live if he were in that man's shoes. No doubt he wanted nothing more than to keep his wife and their tiny daughter safe, and yet he lost everything.

We pray for that family, and all those affected by yesterday's storm, as we hold each other and our own little one closer than ever.