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Good Morning.

I can still see their eyes – dark irises in pools of white, set in faces hollowed by grief. Hundreds of them fixed on me and my colleagues as we gathered to open a cyclone shelter, built in the aftermath of the Super Cyclone that ripped through India In 1999.

These tearless eyes still stalk me. Run dry through weeping for their lost children. When the cyclone hit their village parents scooped up their babies and ran for their lives calling their children to run for theirs. They ran to the stone bridge to find shelter from the storm. But the young ones couldn’t run fast enough. When the cyclone eventually passed parents found their children drowned in the flooded paddy fields.

Now, years later, another cyclone but with different results. Winds of 130 miles an hour have destroyed 200,000 homes,
displaced a million refugees and ruined 300 million dollars worth of crops. But this time Cyclone Phailin (Pie-Lin) has failed to reap so many deaths.

Over the last decade villagers have learnt Disaster Management. Agencies both Indian and International, with money from Britain and others, have built concrete shelters and taught them the skills to survive. I’ve walked the paths now built up above anticipated flood levels; I’ve drunk water from water stands raised to protect them from effluent and I’ve met with village elders and asked them if in their lifetime the weather has changed. They don’t know the science, but they certainly know the reality of a changing climate.

As part of the ceremony to open the Community Cyclone Shelter I was given a coconut to crack, and then poured its milk out as a sign of blessing. Afterwards, I was given a palm tree to plant. As you can imagine, I’ve been thinking a lot about those palms and the people as Cyclone Phailin has swept over them huddled in their shelter.

In the Bible they decorated the Temple with Palm Trees – they too were a symbol of blessing, a sign that God was at work bringing about a new world.

And today, I like to think that those Palm Trees growing outside the Shelter in Orissa herald a new future for the people.

Telling them that the future will be better than the past, and that a new world is coming.

The picture of that new world described in the closing pages of the New Testament has the City from heaven being built on earth, with precious stones including sapphires and emeralds.

And here is an irony! I now discover that Cyclone Phailin that swept in from the east with such devastation in its wings takes its very name from the blue stone of promise – the Sapphire.

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