Why I'm doing this

I'm Matt Clements. I'm pushing 40, I have a gorgeous wife and two fantastic children (a girl and a boy, which is peachy), I work in education and the Kolontar thing has got me all churned up.

I know that disasters, tragedies, however you term them, are happening all over the world, for pretty much most of the time. I'm more aware of some than others, either because of their immense scale or how much coverage they get, what language the victims speak, whether I'm trying to avoid the news or overdose on it (I go in phases like that.)


So I don't know why the toxic spill at Kolontar has particularly hit home more than others, but I've got a few suspicions.

Sometimes I can't shift the thought from my head of the three year old boy who died in the torrent. My son's three. He lives in a town with an immense industrial plant on its outskirts. He's mostly making me laugh and wonder and downright enjoy, what with all the things he says and the daft faces he pulls and his drumming and dancing and running and a hundred other antics. And this other 3 year old was probably just like him, and every day now must be some living nightmare for his parents, and a big part of me just wants to find them and hold them and cry with them and let them know that someone on a different part of the planet is thinking about them and praying for them.

Part of me knows that I could wire some money to the Hungarian Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund, but something won't shift for me in terms of making a more personal connection with the parents who lost children in the flood. I just want to stand with them and find out their needs and think about ways of supporting them over the long haul.

I don't know what will happen, but I want to take a step closer to finding out. So I'm chewing things over and listening out to God for whether I should go to Kolontar for a few days over the Christmas break, and see what that brings.

[I think about Ben Cooley at Hope forJustice signing off some blog post with "Take risks" instead of "Take care", and I've spent plenty of energy these past few years managing risk (in school, at home, in general) and I've developed some very risk-averse behaviours, but if I've heard right on this one then I really I don't want to miss the boat.

[the boat bit: so I was just doodling a logo as a way of getting a bit of mental traction on this stuff, and thinking about the way the last two letters of Kolontar just needed a [k] adding to them to make ark, and how that connected with flood and rescue and safety. And a day or so later I needed another sheet of paper to scribble on and I grabbed a worksheet left over from my kids' Sunday School class last year and it centred on the flood in Genesis. So I took that as a nudge.]