Queer as Faith is a weekly column by Nathan Gunter.  Unconventional and thought-provoking, Nathan writes as a gay Christian struggling to live authentically in the real world.

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Week 10:
There's No Place Like Plrtz Glrb

It just all came down at once.

In the same week, war with Iraq became the only item on the menu, and storm season (otherwise known as spring and early summer) officially reared up in Oklahoma.

Storms roll across the plains just about every other night starting in March and continuing through to June.  We who've lived here for awhile have come to know our meteorologists way too well, to the extent that we went to see the movie Twister just because the weathermen from the local affiliates here all had bit parts as themselves in the movie.

It really started last weekend, but it got rolling last night.  We had actual twisters yesterday.  I watched the green and red and yellow dots move across a computer-generated map of my state, detachedly saying, "Oh yes, this one will probably hit us.  Mmm-hmm.  Yep, that one could be trouble too."  Figuring out what time I needed to be ready to batten down the hatches, to dive into the front closet with a mattress over me, huddled around a radio and a flashlight.

Four years ago, give or take, I came home from college in May to a destroyed neighborhood.  The worst tornado in the history of meteorological science had struck just a stone's throw (literally) from my house - it was by sheer grace of God and prevailing winds that my own house had been saved (although literally lifted off its foundation and set back down again in place).  The area around my house, my high school, and my life looked like a war zone, like a bomb had gone off.  So yesterday I watched the weather, remembering what it was like to need National Guard permission to drive to work, seeing bodies being recovered from high up in trees, driving around giving out gloves, water, or food to people who were suddenly homeless and who had nothing left to do but literally dig through the rubble of what had been their homes to try to find something worth saving.  Things are still being rebuilt here.

I watched it come with a sense of futility and steadfastness.  It's been kind of like the war in that sense: you watch it unfold and it just comes and really there's not a whole lot you can do in the end.  Of course, it's worse with a tornado; you can't protest against the weather.

The Lord in Heaven laughs.

I kept wondering if Baghdad would look anything like my neighborhood had after that F6 had got through with us.  It'll look worse, I know. It'll be worse than I can imagine.  And in the face of inevitable war, what do I pray?  Do I pray that something useful gets accomplished here?  That the world really does become a better place as a result no matter how little I can forsee that?  I can pray that loss of life is kept to a minimum, I suppose, and that the decisions that get made are made in wisdom.

And every time there's a tornado, I think about Dorothy.  After all, she got to just tap her stylish yet affordable shoes together and think about home, and bam, everything just seemed to end up all right.  But I look around at my rebuilt and crumbling world and I know that this is home, that this is life and where I am right now.  It's a place full of fear and infested with the Fall, and yet a place where people take entire weeks off of work to drive around helping people dig through rubble for a stuffed animal, a photo album, or a shred of something normal and old and familiar.

It's confusing.  How you can stare down the gullet of a force of such powerful destruction and change, and sometimes all you can do is just take cover.  Right or wrong, the war is going to change things just like everything keeps changing.

The Lord in Heaven laughs, and knows, and helps us know that power and control aren't the same thing.  The Lord gave us a home, a country, and a world and there's really no place like it for better or for worse in all its scariness and sin and tornadoes and odd compassion, it's ours and that's what's wrong with it.  We have no real power here, only control over the petty stuff.  Tornadoes and wars keep coming to show us that it's not, none of it ever was ours and we tremble to think we could lose it all and finally have something really worthwhile.

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