How do you make God laugh? Make a plan.
I had vague plans for the week ahead when on a Sunday afternoon the wind picked up and a steady rain began to fall yet again, in what has been the wettest summer I have known since coming to reside in Northland over three decades ago.
I recently said to a pastor friend, “Once I saw this or that as a sign from God and this or that as being prophetic but now, for me, everything is a sign and all is prophetic.” He laughed. I took it to be assent. After all, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.”
It was the start of cyclone Gabrielle coming upon the land. Gabrielle is the feminisation of the masculine “Gabriel” which is the name of the archangel who is the “Messenger of God”.
The wind became stronger and the rain fell harder. What plans I had were cancelled and God laughed. Once I would have cursed the wind and the rain but nowadays I am more able to enjoy the joke and I laughed too. At one point above the sound of whistling wind and lashing rain I heard the sound of splintering timber unmistakable to those of us who have spent hours on the back end of a chainsaw.
How is it that when you cut down a tree it falls down but then when you cut it up it stays down?
Without saw or fuel Gabrielle felled a good-sized rewarewa that took a few surrounding manuka with it. I wondered if the storm had bothered to obtain a permit from the council to fell that particular stand of native bush? God and I laughed again.
I always get a bit of a rush when felling large trees. When they fall the earth shakes. In this case, it was not the direct hand of man and machine that altered the landscape. I saw and heard the proverbial tree fall in the forest. It was most impressive: the earth shook.
We live in prophetic times indeed and ‘What can be shaken will be shaken’. In the course of the storm much indeed was shaken. I hunkered down.
On the third day, the rain ceased and the wind eased.
I reside about 3 km along a council road. It provides a disservice to seven rated properties but the Council refuse to contribute anything to its maintenance.
Hoping for the best but expecting the worst I took a spade and a chainsaw and with shanks pony for transport headed out.
Gabrielle had repeated her act of devastation everywhere. I was gratified to see that recent costly and labour-intensive repairs effected on the ‘Bad Corner’ of the road after Cyclone Hale had stood up well, but it was not so elsewhere. The bad part was now the good part and the good parts were now bad, with washouts, slips and fallen trees. It was a road no longer and hardly even a track.
(I took a break at this point in writing this article to sit in the porch and read a little scripture. In my methodical reading, I just happened to be reading the first chapter of the book of Exodus. God and I laughed again.)
I gradually made my way cutting and clearing downed trees. As I went my most immediate neighbour walking the other way met me. A slip and a few trees between us, ‘Gidday mate, just thought I’d do the neighbourly thing and come up to see if you were alright?’
I appreciated his concern. “Yeah, all good mate, won’t be running out of firewood for a while, Howzit down your way?”
“Not too bad”, he said with the traditional Kiwi penchant for understatement, “There’s a pine and a few tea tree down out the front, I’m gonna head down there now and sort it out.”
“Goodo, I’ll carry on working my way down and see ya when I get there.”
He’s a fairly handy fellow himself, as you have to be to live where we live. By the time I got to him most of the cutting had been done and all that remained was to stack up the wood and throw the heads and whatnot down a gully.
It had taken a few hours to cut and dig a rough but serviceable track to the main road, State Highway 1. The satisfaction of achievement was tempered a little by resentment at working on a road that we do not own and which is controlled by an organisation that bleeds us of money but gives nothing but officious oversight in return. Constrained by legislation passed by venal hypocrites in Parliament, Council produces, at a cost of millions, Ten-year Plans. I bet they hadn’t factored cyclones Hale and Gabriel into the last one. “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.” Psalm 2.
Living in a bush-clad mountain range it was easy to assume that we had experienced the worst of the weather and borne the brunt of the destruction.
To assume makes an ass of you and me.
I challenge any member of council staff to match me on the back end of a spade, a shovel, a chainsaw, an axe or indeed even a pen. I doubt whether any will take up this offer. I am sure most are too occupied sitting on their fat arses collecting their fat salaries whilst entertaining fatuous ideas in their fat heads.
Walking out onto New Zealand’s main artery of State Highway 1 was like walking onto the set of a post-apocalyptic movie. By now the sun was out. A deathly quiet and a complete lack of life engulfed the usually busy highway. I walked down the centre line with no fear of traffic. Climbing over the massive slips that stretched over the breadth of New Zealand’s main artery I passed an unmanned 12 ton digger sitting idle. I briefly contemplated checking if the keys were in it. I dismissed the idea thinking that it is probably wrong to hijack someone else’s property despite the motives or the need.
Having cut, dug and walked several kilometres I came to the inevitable collection of road cones closing the highway and came upon a pair of non-worker surrogate road police seated, fluorescent-vested, vaping in the cab of a utility vehicle.
Two blokes in their own time and at their own expense had already cleared a road that serves a half a dozen people whilst a main highway for which all manner of taxes and levies are collected and which serves tens of thousands of New Zealanders remained unattended to. I enquired, perhaps a little more tersely than what was absolutely necessary, “Why is no one doing anything?”
He replied, “They’re having a planning meeting.”
God and I laughed again as I continued down the road and hitched into town.
It’s said that he who laughs last, laughs longest, and God and I are still laughing
