After Katrina, Let the Tears Come
Trying to shut down suffering—that's not the way of Jesus the Christ, who wept at Lazarus's tomb, whose mother and friends endured with him through the Crucifixion. That's not God's way. God's way is to be with us when we suffer. It's not me sitting next to you and struggling with the pain; it's the God who lives in me. These hands are Jesus' hands, and they will hold your hands, if you want, and do for you as best they can.

Take your time. It's going to take time—time to get through the terrible first confusion, time to deal with the afterwash of fear and grief, time to clear up all the devastation, physical and emotional. You need people to be neighbours to you, where you are now; I'll do my best to do that for you.

The one lesson we should have listened to is the one we can heed now: it's not everyone for themselves and devil take the hindmost and I'm in it for Number One; it's that we need community, we need to be responsible one for another, we need to care enough to make some genuine sacrifices for each other.

--Molly Wolf
from "Grief: After Katrina, Let the Tears Come"

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