I just checked, that I've had 198 posts in this avenue and I'm eager to make it 200.
But I want to be sure that I'm really saying something worth its weight and not a regular flippant post with little content or depth.

I've delayed writing about the Sichuan Earthquake because I needed to marshal my thoughts and to learn more about it. It measured 7.9 on the Richter Magnitude Scale, and a quake like that is considered a major one that affects over a large area. The quake is approximately equal to 600 megatons of TNT and is equivalent to 2.4 EJ (exa-joules 10^18) of energy.
As of today May 15, 19,509 people are dead and 69,487 people are injured.

From our comfy seat at the computer, the figures are only statistics and nothing very much more than unfriendly numbers. But behind every death, there is a story of a life snuffed out, and very prematurely for most.

I opened the paper yesterday to see the picture where soldiers were uncovering the rubble at Juyuan Middle school where 900 students and teachers were crushed under at the moment of the quake. The children in the photograph looked like they were only sleeping and unhurt, and they were really young, probably even younger than my sister.

I took a few looks at the picture and avoided it for the rest of the paper.
I don't like the way that death and suffering and disaster all came together in one shot, where the soldiers were too late to rescue the children; the children were already claimed, and their small bodies were huddled together and on top of each other; an occasional face closed in permanent sleep peeked out from under the child on the top of the pile.

There must be still be children underneath and we can only try and guess how frightened these children were when the world came down on them, and their discomfort.
Did they pass away immediately, or did they fade away slowly?

A catastrophe like this also lets us catch glimpses of the resilience of human life, where a pregnant woman survived for 50 hours under the rubble; the love a parent has for their child, where a couple used their bodies to shield their 3-year-old daughter from the walls. The little girl survived; they didn't.

Who of us can understand a parent's grief at the loss of the child that they borne and loved?
A little seed that blossomed inside the mother's stomach for nine months and then continued to hold your hand for the next few years after his or her crying entrance into a world full of turbulence and stimulus. My grandparents are still reeling from the loss of their eldest son which was almost 20 years ago.

These parents will continue to cry tears like they did when they saw the broken body of their child for years.

Every death is a tragedy. This makes the whole affair a compound tragedy.
We don't inherit the full solemnness of this disaster because it's not near to us. But I'd prefer if this would be far far away.

But I am not surprised at any of this, because all of it has been predicted in the Bible.
"For nation will rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will also be famines. These things are merely the beginning of birth pangs".

Mark 13:8 said this. But what really worries me is the fact that the Bible speaks lightly of wars and earthquakes and dismisses them as the beginning of birth pangs, which hints that something more painful and much worse will be on its way.
The Bible is deathly accurate. We should anticipate famines, given the global food shortage problem.

I was going to talk on love, and more cheerful things and also an interesting test that Derek shared with me and I find rather simple, but crisp. I was going to slyly make mention to a girl that I'm leaning towards slightly in the words I laid down above.
But I think I won't tonight.

It doesn't bother me that much even if tonight is the last night we would have.

Few things can beat this.
This is bliss:

It's a wonderful feeling to hold the girl you think about most times so close, and to feel the rhythm of her breathing, and to whisper and murmur to each other until your voices both die away and you both slip into sleep.

finis