tornado love

(Reposted from Facebook cause I like this thought and want to hang on to it.)


Had big fun at the MSI today with Amber! :D We saw the Omnimax version of Tornado Alley. It was directed by, and partly starring, longtime storm chaser Sean Casey. Dude built a homemade tank for the sole purpose of driving into the center of a tornado and filming it. One of the shots early in the movie showed him fitting the tank together and you see a wedding ring. I said afterwards, "he's married to his wife, but he's in love with the tornado."

It made me think, do I love anything the way that guy loves the tornado?

After a movie's worth of near misses and a lot of good science, the storm chasing team finally dooes it. You see a brief shot of Casey's face--helpless, weeping, but filled with a kind of awe and gratitude and pure raw love that you can't fake. Like a storm, that kind of love can rip through a life and devastate it in an instant; it can gather passionate people together and send them out racing in the rain hoping to catch a glimpse of it, hoping to brush up against it.

For me, getting to see someone have an experience like that--that's my tornado. The loves we build our lives around, the dreams and passions wherein we feel a slight inkling of the kind of relentless joy God must take in his creation, must have felt to have formed it in the first place, these things fuel us and shape who we become. Your driving love in a sense is your name, the touchstone on which your being rests. Sean Casey is a storm chaser, and in the climax of that movie, he caught one.

I live to see names come true. Like a storm, I can't make it happen. But I can do good science and look for the signs and hang on through long dry seasons for the hint of a glimpse of it. It doesn't happen in a place, and it doesn't leave scars across the landscape as such. But it's getting to see in people, just for a moment, what God must have seen when he first imagined them, what they know themselves to truly be in that secret place beneath all the pettiness and worry.

How do you chase that? Where do you go to find more of it? There's no Tornado Alley for the human heart; one place, one social group, one endeavor is really as good as another. But I'm glad to have that image for it.