How weak we are ...

We live in a house outside Philadelphia, in a place called Bala Cynwyd, a Welsh name, an area filled with old trees, in a single story, mostly glass and wood house.  Most of the houses around here are stone colonial types, built when Bala Cynwyd was a mostly middle class neighborhood, with sidewalks, and schools within walking distance, and I grew up here in a stone colonial and walked to school through those neighborhoods.

Our house now though is newer, and almost Japanese in design, flat and a little isolated, with the trees around us providing beauty and calm.  Except today.

Today we are living though an ice and rain storm, on top of a snowstorm that came the other day.  The ice and rain is making the snow too heavy for the trees, and trees and branches and clumps of snow from the trees and branches are falling all around us.  What’s more, our house has many skylights, and every few seconds, for the past hour or so, a pile of snow slides off a branch, or a the branch itself breaks off the tree, and lands on one of the skylights with a huge bang, so my spouse and I uncomfortably eye each other, wondering if the skylights are going to shatter and allow the rain and snow to pour into our house.

Our cars were parked outside, under one of the trees in our driveway earlier today, until the tree finally dropped a branch on two of them, simultaneously, severely denting mine.

The power has been on and off all day too, first starting early this morning, 4:30 am, and we woke up then, but tried to ignore things for awhile, hiding in our bed because there wasn’t even coffee to be had.

And I have the rosary out because there are no atheists in fox holes, and I am not an atheist, far from it.

All these comforts, their loss and our worry.  How weak we are in a way, and how much stronger are those that lived in the past, a time of far more challenges; or those who live today in a war zone, or in the poorest, most crime ridden areas, and yet live and love and believe in God.