Out of touch with reality?

This is something I drew from a photograph taken the day after the 2011 Quake, when my son was still a teenager.

The day before, Kinya had gone to the stores and bought a lot of things he found on sale. Little did we know that when the quake hit, there would be a mad rush for the stores, when all the food would disappear from the shelves...but we had bought surplus, cheaply, the day before! Keima's classmate had come back from going to a store across the street--you had to stand in line a long time to get just one thing then--to find him playing soccer with some neighborhood kids in our parking lot, (because we didn't have to go to the store!) When he saw I'd taken a photo, he said wryly the pic should be titled, "Kids don't know what reality is."

He was thinking it was adults who knew earthquake reality meant you got fatigued, shouldn't be smiling anymore. I thought, if you're in touch with the One Who controls reality such He gets you goods the day before so you have time to play soccer, doesn't that mean you're doing a little better with this reality business, maybe?

I sent this picture to Keima last week.

One Cross Stitch That Survived the Quake

"Really...WHAT...can I take?"

After the 2011 earthquake and ensuing nuclear radiation fiasco when we were leaving Koriyama, the only things that we could take were what could be carried in our backpacks. When we reached our destination after the long bus ride, I looked at some of the things that were brought and had to chuckle.

But at that time, there was no time to think carefully. Gasoline was scarce; public transportation wasn't moving; main roads and railways were broken up and unusable. We'd found a way to get out on a bus patching together usable back roads so got seats on it, but there was such a rush for it as soon as word got out about it, we couldn't get seats next to each other but ended up all sitting in separate rows.

The morning of March 11, hundreds of junior highers marched across their school platforms and received graduation diplomas...but that afternoon, some of them found themselves horrifically torn from their families--the diplomas they had earned a few hours earlier meant nothing to them then.

The tsunami is a good teacher. When a powerful black wave is receding into the ocean, pulling its victims with it, people realize instantly they do not value paper currencies and contracts floating by; it is the struggling, terrified sibling they automatically reach out their hand to help--and will risk their own lives to save, to keep from being sucked down into the whirling waters.

Perhaps a cute piece of handcraft may seem silly, frivolous. But family is one of the most important human gifts God can give us on this earth.

I rather think He prodded me to put this thingy into my backpack.