It's Okay. We're Okay.

Earthquakes terrified me as a child - ironic, since I live 10 miles from the San Andreas fault. While the terror of those years has passed, shakers still irk me a bit. Tonight, when my mom called home telling me to turn on the news to find out about the tsunami warning on the West Coast, a distinct feeling creeped up my spine. Ah yes. Each individual hair on my neck standing on end. That feeling.

But we're okay. To begin with, we're far away from the epicenter of the quake, which was way north and off the coast. We're 50 miles inland and protected by the coastal range - something my mom quickly assured me meant safety. Gosh Mom, if you're gonna tell me to check out "the tsunami warning," you could start with that reminder!

Even more wonderful, it seems as though nobody in Crescent City or anywhere else up north is in trouble. Unlike the big quake after Christmas in Indonesia, this one was a sideways slip of the plates rather than the vertical jerk that brought deadly tides for hundreds of miles.

I was thinking about blogging tonight about work. Today was a good day at work... but with the reminder of how fragile and frail life and this world really are, anything else seems almost irreverent. This life is "a wave tossed in the ocean, a vapor in the wind." Life is a "vapor" I've been grimacing at lately, but a good dose of perspective came with that hair-raising.

And if California falls into the ocean next time, I'd like to think I lived up this vapor to the One who breathed it into me.