Mennonite Weekly Review

Around midnight on May 19, 1996, a tornado skirted the Minnesota Hutterite colony where our family lived with about 100 other people. In less than a minute, it destroyed several buildings, including a large metal-working shop, the source of our income. As a former National Weather Service tornado spotter, I had seen the storm bearing down for several minutes, hoping it would spin itself out and lift.

But the churning whirlwind — illuminated by spears of intense lightning — narrowly missed our houses, flattened our 120-foot feed mill leg and grain bins and sheared the roof from our shop, tossing steel, crushed like giant wads of paper, in a mile-long diagonal across neighboring farms. By some miracle, no one was hurt.

Early the next morning, as colony members surveyed the damage and wondered where to start unraveling the mess, an older gentleman came up to me, his face drawn with an acute concern, and invoked the vicissitudes of Job.

“The Lord gives and the Lord takes away,” he said in Hutterisch German. Then he paused a moment, quietly finding his voice again. After all, he had helped build this place from the ground up, sacrificing much along the way. “So, let us praise the Lord, even for this! Can we really do that?”

Standing there, broken glass and rain-soaked insulation beneath our feet, he jabbed my chest and said, even more emphatically: “God is saying something very, very serious to us here today. I hope we pay attention.”

Following the destruction of Greensburg, Kan., by a tornado the night of May 4, I thought again of this encounter, and also of Job — “do you know how the clouds hang poised …” (37:16) — and the message Job received from a whirlwind amid his own suffering, much like the people of Greensburg endure now.

The tornado, rated an EF-5, the worst possible ranking on the new enhanced Fujita scale, cast Greensburg to the ground, tearing brick from brick and killing at least 10 people. A sheriff’s deputy in a neighboring county also died in the storm.

By the sobering light of day, Greensburg no longer resembled a small Kansas town, but post-apocalypse Hiroshima, with its empty streets leading nowhere, ragged trees and road signs its only landmarks. At one end of town, only a battered grain elevator remains to show that once, here was a community of people, living and working and raising children and, as they did that night, dying.

What will become of Greensburg remains to be seen. But judging by a gathering in nearby Haviland, Kan., of the members of Greensburg Mennonite Church — also leveled by the tornado — the people have the spirit and initiative to start over, building from the traces of their old town a new one. In the story of Job, after all, God, who spoke through the whirlwind, gave his faithful servant a new chance at life.

In the days of grief and hardship to come, Greensburg, as well as neighboring farmers — often forgotten because they are so remote — will need much encouragement and help.

Already there is hope. As Paul Unruh of Mennonite Disaster Service told the small church gathering May 6, “Mennonites all over the U.S. and Canada are praying for you today. You are literally in thousands of prayers today.” Soon those prayers will turn to helping hands as people come to offer Greensburg the assistance it will need for years to come.