We are True Believers

We are True Believers

Monday, December 26, 2011

The butterfly people of Joplin

In the chaotic first days after the tornado, when nothing seemed real, word of the butterfly people began to spread.

The stories were shared in hospital waiting rooms and in lines for donated food. They were told by neighbors on streets so devastated there was nothing to do but stand and stare. A Red Cross counselor heard the stories as she handed out water and work gloves to residents in a hard-hit part of town. She got goose bumps. She told her pastor, who asked her to tell the congregation. She remembers how the crowd gasped.

The stories about butterfly people coursed through Joplin, passing one by one and then by the many, tales describing what children reported seeing on that Sunday night in May as the tornado bore down. The children said the butterfly people protected them.

These stories, tales of guardian angels, could be dismissed as a child's fanciful imagination. But the stories have taken hold here. And as the months have slipped by, the adrenaline fading along with some of the terror, the stories have assumed a new, maybe even more important role. To understand why, you have to understand what this town of 50,000 went through — and what it still faces.

The tornado killed 161 people. It shredded entire neighborhoods. More than 900 homes were lost. Big box stores collapsed. The destruction was complete, the landscape rendered foreign.

The tornado unleashed stories about death and unlikely survival: A teenager sucked from an SUV, a toddler plucked from his mother's arms, houses that exploded in 200-mph winds as families huddled in bathtubs and closets. For months, just about any place people gathered, the stories spilled out, including stories about the butterfly people.

The stories eventually found their way to Marta Churchwell. She is the skeptical sort, tough, a raspy-voiced former newspaper reporter. The longtime Joplin resident is not religious by the standards of a town known as the buckle on the Bible Belt. She is not inclined to believe in angels. But she saw what the May 22 tornado did to her town. The experience, she said, 'seared me clear to the bone."

"Looking out over the landscape, how did anyone survive? I don't know. I can't give you an answer," Churchwell said. "But it's human nature to try to find an answer."

And that's where the stories of butterfly people take flight.

• • •

The stories changed with passing time and telling. But two versions dominated.

In one, a mother and daughter fled their vehicle as the tornado neared. The girl is 3 years old. In some versions, she is 4. They have no time to reach a nearby house. The mother and daughter hit the ground. The mother covers her child. Sometimes they jumped into a culvert. Other times, into a front yard. The mother watches as the winds hurtle her car toward them. She braces for the impact. The tornado passes. They are not hurt. The mother is astonished. "Weren't they pretty?" the daughter asks. The mom is confused. "Didn't you see the butterfly people?" the daughter says. In some versions, the daughter describes seeing the butterfly people also ferrying men and women into the sky.

The other story involves a father or grandfather and two young boys. They also are trapped outside during the tornado. In most tellings, the winds are so strong the soles of the father's shoes are ripped off. But no one is hurt. Again, it is the young boys, usually described as 3 or 4 years old, who saw butterfly people hovering above them, offering protection.

Shelley Wilson heard the story of the mother and daughter. She works as a high school counselor. After the tornado, she volunteered for a Red Cross disaster mental health team. She drove through neighborhoods distributing supplies, assessing how people were holding up. She doesn't remember who told her the butterfly people stories. She heard them several times. It was never firsthand — the stories never seemed to come from someone who experienced them.

But that didn't lead Wilson to doubt.

"It's the only way we can really, honestly understand how more people were not killed," she said. "When you walk through what was left, it just kind of took your breath away."

Wilson told the story to her church. That's where Mary Parks heard it. Parks shared it with her women's golf group, including Ellen Desmond. Desmond told her brother, who lives in upstate Illinois. He recounted the tale on his community news blog.

Marsha Sherrod heard the story while volunteering at a tornado donation center. She shared it with her Sunday school class at Forest Park Baptist. One boy, a quiet 11 year old, raised his hand. The boy said he saw the butterfly people that night too, Sherrod recalled.

She believes angels were there.

"If you had seen what I saw," she said, "you would understand."

She told the story to a friend in the church choir. Darlene "DJ" Bates is an artist. The story inspired her. She painted a watercolor showing an angel above a cowering mother and daughter in the tornado. She titled it "Butterfly People."


Snowbound ASU Student Survives 10 Days

An Arizona State University student missing for 10 days survived on a Snickers candy bar, a bag of M&M's candies and melted snow for drinking water, authorities said Wednesday after the 23-year-old was found in a desolate area of east Arizona.

Lauren Elizabeth Weinberg, a senior at ASU, was found in southeastern Coconino County just before noon, Coconino County sheriff's spokesman Gerry Blair said. Two U.S. Forest Service employees on snowmobiles found her Wednesday about 45 miles southeast of Winslow while they were checking gates on forest roads.



"I am so thankful to be alive and warm," Weinberg said in a news release from Flagstaff Medical Center. "Thank you everyone for your thoughts and prayers, because they worked. There were times I was afraid but mostly I had faith I would be found."

Weinberg, who was released from Flagstaff Medical Center early Thursday, was last seen leaving her mother's home in south Phoenix on Dec. 11 and told authorities she became stuck in the snow a day later, Blair said.

"She told us she left on a paved road out of Winslow that turns into a dirt road, which makes sense cause that would be that Forest Road 34," says Blair.



Sunday, September 25, 2011

Miracle Pocket dialing to her dad

An accidental pocket dial from a cell phone may have saved a 20-year-old Town of Lima woman from greater harm.

According to a criminal complaint, 21-year-old Floyd Rashid, of Sheboygan, is accused of pinning his girlfriend to the ground and threatening her life Monday night.

The complaint says while the attack was happening, Rashid's cell phone pocket-dialed his girlfriend's father, who heard his daughter screaming and heard Rashid ask her if she wanted to die.

The Sheboygan Press reports the father sped to the couple's house and found Rashid still pinning the woman. He then grabbed Rashid and threw him against a wall and Rashid ran away.

Rashid was charged Wednesday with felony counts of false imprisonment and strangulation and suffocation as well as misdemeanor disorderly conduct.

"When I saw my dad I was shaking, and I hugged him. And I was like thank you," said Mauer-Pfister


Sunday, March 27, 2011

From World War 2

The story of Fr. Maximillian Kolbe, a Polish Catholic priest who with four monasty companions was imprisoned at Auschwitz.

When a prisoner went missing (his body was later found stuffed into a latrine), the Nazi guards selected ten prisoners to death as a reprisal - they would be sent to a strarvation hut where they would slowly die.

One of the men selected exclaimed in grief at the prospects for his family if he were to be killed, and Fr. Kolbe volunteered to receive the man's punishment in his place.

He and four other prisoners took too long to die, and the guards needed the cell for other purposes, so a Polish trustee injected them with lethal doses of carbolic acid. The man Fr. Kolbe saved survived, and lived to the age of 95. Kolbe was beatified a Saint by Pope John Paul II.

http://www.auschwitz.dk/kolbe.htm

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Miracle rescue 9 days after Japan earthquake

An 80 year-old grandmother and her 16 year-old grandson were found suffering from hypothermia but otherwise unharmed nine days after an earthquake and tsunami destroyed their home in the Miyagi prefecture city of Ishinomaki.

More than 20,000 people are dead or missing in the devastation from a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami on March 11 but Sumi Abe and her grandson Jin Abe managed to survive the bitter cold in the wreckage of their home for over a week.

The two, who were in the kitchen when the quake struck, survived on yogourt, Coca-Cola and water from the refrigerator, media are reporting.

Miyagi prefecture was the hardest hit of the Japanese prefectures with a confirmed death toll of 4,882.