Here is what happened, as best as it has been reported. On the afternoon of Sunday, July 26, an intense burst of rainfall fell over Weiyuan County, in Dingxi City, in China's northwestern Gansu Province. The water gathered where water gathers, and it came down through a scenic area where people had gone out for the day. Campers. Families. Rescue crews reached 207 people who had been stranded; 174 of them were brought out alive. Early reports counted ten dead. Then, this past Sunday, the official news agency raised the toll: twenty-five killed, twenty-three injured. The rains have not stopped. Authorities in Gansu have warned that more of the hillsides may give way.
What has stayed with me all week is not the water. It is the ordinariness of what came before it. Nobody drove out to that valley expecting anything but a good afternoon. They packed food. Somebody probably complained about the drive. Somebody took a picture standing in front of the rocks. And then, in the space of an hour, the day they had planned was simply gone.
James saw this clearly, and he said it without cruelty: "Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away."
I want to be careful here, because that verse has been used as a whip, and it was never meant to be one. James is not sneering at us. He is not saying our lives are worthless, or that the picnic was foolish, or that the people in that valley were somehow being taught a lesson. Vapour is not an insult. Vapour is morning breath in cold air ΓÇö real, visible, beautiful, and brief. James is telling the truth about us the way a doctor tells the truth: not to shame you, but so you will stop pretending, and start living like a person who knows.
And I confess I do pretend. I schedule things two years out as though I had signed a contract with the calendar. I put off the phone call. I assume the person I am angry with will still be there when I finally get around to forgiving them.
There is a detail from those first days of the search that I cannot shake. Three hundred and five firefighters went in, with sixty-eight engines and four search-and-rescue dogs. And because so many of the missing were carrying phones and wearing smartwatches, rescuers used the last known location data from those devices to aim their search ΓÇö following the faint electronic breadcrumb a person leaves behind, walking toward it through the mud, because somebody down there might still be breathing. That is what it looks like to take a single human life seriously. Not a statistic. A signal worth wading into a debris field for.
The scale of this flood season is enormous. Across Sichuan, state media reported that more than 881,000 residents have been relocated since the rains began. I cannot hold 881,000 people in my mind. But God does not have my limitation. He does not round us off. He does not lose one of us in the crowd.
Which brings me to the prayer I have been praying since Sunday, the one Moses prayed: "So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."
Notice that we do not do the numbering. We ask to be taught it. Left to myself I will either forget that my days are counted at all, or I will count them in a panic, hoarding them, terrified of spending one. Neither of those is wisdom. Wisdom is what happens when a numbered day gets applied ΓÇö when knowing the vapour is brief makes me tender instead of frantic.
So make the call today. Say the thing. Go be a rescuer for somebody, even in the small way you have available. Twenty-five families in Gansu are learning this week how much an ordinary Sunday was worth. We still have ours.
Lord, teach us to number our days. And be near, this night, to everyone digging in that mud, and to everyone waiting at home for news that may not come. Amen.