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This article originally published on the Showbear Family Circus, a delightful literary journal (and sister site to the toad) curated by a former Joplin resident.

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by Lance Schaubert (photos by Mark Neuenschwander)

I wish Tara and I had less experience in disasters, but the truth is we have more than several lifetimes worth. I was on a team that served in Galveston after the hurricane – Zach Williams led worship before he was in the Lone Bellow, in fact. I was on a team in Katrina. Tara and I both helped in Detroit with refugees teaching citizenship and english during the crash – also spent a bit of time in 8-mile and 9-mile with food pantries. Tara’s from Ferguson where her family has stayed. I grew up in a floodplain in Southern Illinois. We both survived the history-making Joplin tornado, did our survey trips in New York the week hurricane Sandy hit, did a service trip the first month of our marriage in Tunisia right before the arab spring, and so on. We’ve just missed it, been in the thick of it, survived it, and helped the city thrive after it multiple times.

I wouldn’t say we’re experts because of all of that, but I would say there’s basic principles that have proven true again and again:

Joy beats bitterness. Every team we’ve been on and every time we’ve tried to help, the ones who made jokes in the midst of hardship, the ones who sang and whistled while they worked cleaning up the rubble, the ones who told children’s stories to one another and shared stories of better times thrived. As Tolkien said, escapism is not about denial. It’s about doing what all prisoners do: remembering a better world lies just outside the prison bars, a world towards which we all strive. Joy wins, so revel in it wherever you can, however small.
Ingenious morality or the rules don’t say you can’t, you can. People often over-limit themselves and times like these call for ingenuity. Spoons become shovels, blankets become nets, and so forth: tap into your inner child. In the words of Chesterton:I may express this other feeling of cosmic cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood, “Robinson Crusoe,” which I read about this time, and which owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence. Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck. Every man has had one horrible adventure: as a hidden untimely birth he had not been, as infants that never see the light. Men spoke much in my boyhood of restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it is a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.

It will surprise you whom you forgot to check in on and that’s okay. Weeks, months, years afterwards you’ll run into an acquaintance and audibly sigh and let the tension out of your shoulders involuntarily. Why? Because you didn’t realize you hadn’t known that THEY TOO made it out okay.After the tornado, I didn’t know for a year whether one of my best friends from college was alright until I ran into him at the grocery store. I ran up to him and hugged him and cried and laughed.
Replace yourself. Work yourself out of every job and responsibility you find. Otherwise compassion fatigue and burnout will set in like ten times faster. Pastors, medical personnel, and the like will both leave and quit in waves for up to three years after this: you are replaceable and if you admit that now, you will actually last longer and be a hundred times more effective.
Sabbath. Do nothing but BE one day a week. In addition, divert daily for reflection and prayer or at least deep thought. Do a quick retreat for a couple of days once a month. Do a larger retreat once a quarter. Do a vacation once a year. I’m not talking a cruize or photos for your stream. I’m talking a simple change of scenery and a $25/night cabin or a friend’s house or just sleeping in your car with a journal.
Fast. It’ll help your prayer focus, it liberates your mind to imagine better solutions and worlds, it’ll help you from being overweight if you’re isolated at home, and after three days of fasting your entire immune system will reset.
Feast. When the time comes again, celebrate together with neighbors, strangers, friends – celebrate small things, really small things, that people take for granted like having a park or being alive.
Stock up on rice, beans, and remember that if the pipes are going to freeze or something, it’s better to have a bathtub of clean water for a month than to have a bathtub full of a clean you for a day.
Read the classics in your downtime. The worst times call for the best thoughts. You’re likely already burnt out on streaming and whatnot, you might as well see what all the historical fuss is about concerning Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (David Slavitt translation).
Volunteer outside your comfort zone. If worst comes to worst and half the country gets it, and anywhere from 1-10 million people die, you’re going to need to man up, woman up, and pitch in wherever you can. YouTubing some basic things like wound and catheter care now is a good idea: everyone should be willing to be a CNA, a courier, or an innovator in this time.
Make good art. What gave us an identity in Joplin after the tornado is not being “that tornado town,” but rather the culture:

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After the tornado: a Primer on Disaster

The Joplin Toad is a Creative Collective.