It was a Wednesday, about a week and  half after Hurricane Ike ripped through Houston and Galveston. I was at home, trying to clean up my room, which probably looked like it had been hit by a smaller, but still violent, storm, when one of my best friends, Mie Millard, returned my call. 

We discussed what we had each been doing since coming home. My youth group and I had helped move fallen branches from damaged yards in the Third Ward of Houston on Monday, and I was trying to figure out how I was ever going to finish my US History project. Mie had spent the last two days cleaning out houses in her neighborhood, and was planning on figuring out her school work within the next few days. 

Eventually, we began discussing our plans to return to school after two and a half weeks of evacuation, fear, worry, relief, volunteer projects, and excitement over little things like ice cream or even frozen broccoli in the grocery store. I mentioned that I still needed to write the editorial I had volunteered to do for the school paper. It was the conversation that followed that would impact me more than I realized at the time. 

“Are you going to write your editorial about Hurricane Ike?” Mie asked. 

“No,” I said, “I think I’m going to go ahead with my original idea. I mean, I’m already thinking about putting out a couple of story ideas to cover the hurricane. Besides, I’m not sure how much more people are really going to want to hear about it.” 

“Yeah, I guess so,” she said, “But I mean, you live in a neighborhood that didn’t really get a lot of damage, right?” 

“Yeah, we’re a relatively new neighborhood, so we just had a few downed trees and some fences blown over,” I said, “Things are pretty much back to normal here.” 

“See, my neighborhood is still pretty much a mess,” she said, “I mean, half of the houses around me are pretty much okay, but the other half are just unlivable. It’s just kind of weird, you know? I mean we’re not on television or anything, so it’s like the rest of the world is going on around us, but we’re still trying to recover.” 

Mie lives in Nassau Bay. Her zip code was in the “after Monday” group, those who would not get power back until at least a week after the hurricane. While her house escaped with little damage besides a lost fence and a lot of debris, houses near hers at lower elevations sustained extensive water damage, and their owners have lost everything. It will be a long time before their lives are as “normal” as mine was a week after the storm. 

I thought little of her comment at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized she was right. While I was sitting around worrying about how I was going to finish my homework, there were people worrying about when they might get power back, or even worrying about where they were going to stay that night. While I was trying to forget about Ike, others have had their lives defined by it. My world was still spinning, while theirs had come to a drastic stop, and while I had done my share of volunteering to help out those less fortunate than me, I couldn’t help but realize that I was secretly half wishing that life would just go on “as usual.” 

I’ll admit I eventually ended up feeling a little bit guilty about my attitude. Would it be too much for me to maybe put my life on hold to help out someone who needed a person to care? Maybe I would lose some time to do my work, maybe I would have to give up a little bit of my personal life, but if those things are my biggest concern, then I am a blessed person indeed. 

I soon realized, however, that this isn’t just about Hurricane Ike. Every day, I encounter people who are struggling with cleaning up the messes from their own life’s “storms.” It could be the teenager hiding a drug addiction, the sixteen year old facing an unexpected pregnancy, or even the accident on the freeway that keeps me from getting to church on time. It is the wife who still hasn’t recovered from September 11, the son who lost his father to the War in Iraq. It was my dad when he was going through a divorce. It was me when I was struggling with depression and anxiety. It was a friend of mine dealing with an alcoholic parent. It is all of us who have ever felt like life was going by around us at 65 miles per hour, while we were left broken down on the side of the road waiting for help. 

Every day, I have a chance to help someone who could need anything from a hug to having their house rebuilt, from a bag of ice to a listening ear, and in the end, to just know that someone else cares for them. It might be a few minutes of my time, or it might be an entire day, but either can be equally important to the person who needs help. In my experience, the worst part of suffering isn’t necessarily the actual circumstances; it’s feeling forgotten in the midst of them. Taking the time to reach out to someone, no matter how trivial it seems, has a far greater impact in the great scheme of things than we realize. It can mean the difference between life and death, between ruin and reconstruction. 

So maybe the next time I hear an update on Hurricane Ike, I won’t wonder why we’re still talking about it; I’ll be happy for the people who are one step closer to getting their life back together. Instead of wishing that disaster relief teams would hurry up and fix the damage, maybe I can help be part of the solution. Maybe instead of skipping around the subject, I’ll look someone in the eyes and ask them what’s wrong. I won’t pull this off perfectly, but I will make a difference.