Keeping Our Heads Above Water

Unless you’ve been living in a cave (one on very high ground), no doubt you’ve heard about the flooding that’s going on now in Australia.

I’ve gotten a lot of messages from concerned folk – first of all, let me say: yes, we are fine, safe and above the flood level.

The waters are rising all around us, we’re quite trapped in our little area, which has become an island in a sea of torrents. Our home is on top of a very steep hill, so although many of our neighbours are flooded under, and we couldn’t leave our village or get very far up the road for a while, our home is out of the water.

I went to the supermarket while I could and stocked up – the place was packed full of people getting cases of tinned food. One of my friends said she got to her local town after being cut off for days, only to find the town was running out of food.

Many of our neighbours haven’t been so lucky, and people living around here, many thousands of people, have lost their homes. The area flooded is massive. It’s hard to really conceive of it, a week ago the news report was an area of Queensland the size of Germany and France combined. This week parts of New South Wales, a town to the south of us, Grafton – a town I used to live in and have many friends and people I call family in – flooded. That adds enough area to the flood-devastated region to throw in Spain as well.

I send my prayers and blessings to all those affected. I can’t imagine, really, even though I can see the raging waters, I can’t quite wrap my brain around the magnitude of this flood, and the ferocity of nature, ripping everything clean.

I think of the people who managed to get out, evacuate in time with their loved ones and valuables, expecting to come back to water damage, but still have their home, only to find that their roof was ripped off by passing cars rushing through the torrent.

Whole cities, whole communities are under water. And still it continues to rain.