I sat at my desk on Monday, shuffling through the pile of paper that threatens to avalanche into the floor at any moment. The usual Monday interruptions came and went—telemarketers selling things we didn’t need (and often had never heard of), people wanting to change our phone service provider or credit card processor, very nice folks offering to sell us office/janitorial/funeral supplies at prices much lower than we are currently paying … there are days it seems never ending and constantly distracting. As the day wears on and I struggle to focus on the work so I’ll at least think I’ve accomplished something, I vaguely remember hearing my daughter, who works just across the room from me, say something about a tornado and Oklahoma. It didn’t really register, except to know that it had happened, and I continued on my mission of staring at a computer monitor and trying to make sense of what I was seeing.

Night fell, the building emptied, and I finally decided to go home as well … but before I closed out my email and the website—along with everything else that was open on my computer—I opened MSN just to check the latest news. The red banner across the top of the page startled me and the heading it contained made my stomach turn. As I read the article to which it led, the extent of the devastation immediately became apparent. At that time the death toll stood at 51, a number which, thankfully, was lowered in the hours that followed. But at that moment, it was reported as 51—and 20 of those were allegedly children.
Children …Two elementary schools destroyed and 20 children dead. Twenty.

Visions of Sandy Hook Elementary flashed through my brain, only this time Nature held the weapon. As I sat at my desk, plodding away at the work which lay before me, unaware of much save the incessant ringing of the phone, an act of nature so horrific in its force had destroyed the past of an entire town and forever altered their future. No one’s life would ever be the same. Whether they lost their child or their spouse or their home—or even if they escaped the wrath of nature inflicted in the form of a whirling cloud of dust and debris—they would never be the same.

As the days passed, I was constantly reminded by every news station of the ongoing search for survivors, of the number injured and the property obliterated. Piles of rubble that once were homes dominated the news. Mountains of cars twisted almost beyond recognition were on every internet news site. And while trying to process all of this, it suddenly dawned on me that this is only one event in a world of equally horrific events. Every day, masses of people suffer at the hands of Nature or, worse yet, of other people. No one is immune. No one is protected. And it doesn’t have to be across the nation—or the world. It can be my neighbor, the people with whom I work and attend church, the people who live across my town or county. I can be as oblivious to their suffering as I was to the tragedy that took place on Monday afternoon in Moore, Oklahoma, only in most instances I won’t have MSN or some other news agency to bombard me with all the details.

I need to pay more attention to those with whom I come in contact. I need to see them, to know them. I need to look for the hurt and the suffering and the pain that may be hidden from my view—and I need to do whatever is within my power to change that, or at least, for a brief moment, to alleviate it. I can’t control the weather. I can’t remove evil from the hearts of mankind. But I can smile at the person I meet on the street. I can ask how someone is because I genuinely want to know—and I can listen when they answer the question. I can realize that my inability to recognize their needs and their pain does not mean they are nonexistent. It just means I was too blind to see.

The post Too Blind to See appeared first on Shackelford Funeral Directors | Blog.