(Photo: Everything GP)
There is much we can take for granted about life, it hit me how fast things can change on our drive over to British Columbia last week.
I had a parcel to mail and we stopped in at the Beaverlodge post office on our way, it was probably about 9:15 am.
As we drove towards BC, the radio proclaimed that there was a chance of severe thunder storms in the area, we never saw anything remotely like a storm, we might have had 5 minutes of a very light rain drizzle at some point.
You can imagine my shock when I later learned that by 2:30 pm the same day, the little town of Beaverlodge had declared a state of emergency as the town was flooded. Yup, they had received over 50.5 mm of rain in a short 2 hour period and it flooded. The highway was closed and the traffic diverted, cars were floating, water was halfway up the semi-trucks parked along the highway. A river boat was running up and down on what had been the former highway filming the devastation.
The post office is on the highway section where the water flooded, needless to say with the roads all closed, the mail never moved that day (my parcel has now reached its destination).
I think what was so hard to get my mind wrapped around was how fast life changed. In the blink of an eye – life was drastically changed for everyone in the area. We get up in the morning thinking that we know how our day will pan out, but we never can truly know what a day might hold, good or bad; this particular day just proved it. Life can happen so fast and so suddenly without warning or cause and come at you like an unsuspecting punch in the face.
We came back 3 days later and the only signs we could see of life being changed were 2 restoration vac trucks sucking the water out of a couple buildings and 3 big piles of rubbish outside of 3 different places of business. If you had not known about the flood you would not have known anything was wrong but life did change whether we could see it or not.
In a world where so many abnormal incidents are happening, volcanos, earthquakes, floods, lightening and wildfires, wind storms, tornados, hail – all are incidents where you cannot plan, they happen and you are there. Do you not find these things are increasing? In my own world in the past month on our way home from Mexico our plane got diverted to Edmonton from Calgary just as we were above the runway and about to touch down because a storm got so bad they had to close the Calgary airport behind us, (it was a bumpy ride) and now this extreme flood. These were just 2 weeks apart.
What can we take away from these events, what can we learn?
Life owes you nothing. God never promised that our life would be problem free. Our life can change without a moment’s warning. The Bible says we can expect hard times and tribulation. I think many of us think that if we “live right” we will be exempt from the suffering. Nope, God never promises us that. He promises that He will never leave us alone and will be with us in every life circumstance including suffering. (John 16:33, Romans 8:35)
It was a stark reminder to me that we cannot take each other for granted because you just never know when life can happen. Let us not be too busy in our days to forget to value each other, remember to say I Love You often, kiss and hug each other goodbye, welcome each other home: be a respecter of those who mean the world to us, because you just never know what might happen in just one day.