Rahway and the Ongoing Siege of Sandy

My sons are complaining about gas lines. We have lines outside of gas stations stretching for miles. People line their cars up the night before and leave them until the morning to get a good place in line. Every gas station has at least one police officer to keep people from getting too crazy. We haven’t run out of gas in our cars yet. We are hoping that things will get back to normal this week.

Normal is something we all take for granted. When normal was taken away this week, it really freaked us out. We have all had positive and negative reactions to the lack of normal. I’ll start with the negative. A constant restless feeling that causes a small amount of stress, but the stress never goes away. The lack of a normal routine is surprisingly stressful. A feeling of isolation from the outside world. No school or work to go to means less contact with people outside of our immediate family. And there is the very stressful notion that it will never end. We all kept looking up the street for PSE&G trucks to start fixing the damage. Every time we saw one we cheered, and then they moved on. After that we returned to that awful feeling that we will never experience normal again.

Now the good side of no electricity. We only had one room that was heated in our house. So, we kept the fireplace stoked with wood, and set up a poker table in the middle of the room. We sat and played games, we have lots of them stored in the house. We talked, we read, we played Sudoku. Generally our family spent a lot of time together, rather than separate into different parts of the house. We got along great and when jobs needed doing, like going out on the hunt for provisions, all of us volunteered without complaint. We also had Sarah with us. Sarah is Ed’s girlfriend and a student at Rutgers. Her dorm was shut down for the week, so she spent the time with us. She was great, we got to know her and she got to know us. So there turned out to be a lot of positives from Super Storm Sandy.

The good news is we got power on Saturday night. Yeah, but many people in Rahway still do not have electricity. We have many challenges ahead. The church doesn’t have power yet. That’s a worry because of the threat of freezing pipes. The flat roof is damaged and we haven’t found a roofer to cover it yet. A storm is coming on Wednesday, so I have until then to get it covered. Many people still need help. So, pray for us.

God bless you,

Pastor Bill