Everything about pictures

I was the one among the office workers in Jakarta tall buildings who rushed outside when the earthquake started to rattle around 03:00 pm. on Wednesday (Sept 2nd). Of course, this is the best way anticipating the possible collapse of buildings. The tremor indeed sent panic across the city and we felt the jolt of a 7.3-magnitude earthquake Luckily my office was located on the 4th floor (known as 3A referring to Chinese preference number) so it didn’t take a long time for me to reach out and I didn’t have to feel exhausted after running down. But the sways left me in dizziness out there and I kept feeling sick for a couple of hours.

For me, this is the first time that I feel the tremble. Many coworkers of mine had felt the same experiences a few years before and according to them, this is the worst.

It took around one hour to bring back our guts to get back to work. And none of us had the initiative to call it a day, not even my two pregnant coworkers. We got back to work and exchanged pleasantries, instead.

However, there is an encouraging story coming along with this tragedy, to my astonishment. One of our coworkers turned out to have been trapped in the office. He had been locked in and left behind after all of the employees had run out and scrambled for their own safety. Even though the whole of the office door was covered by glass, he had not tried to break it by throwing out some chairs or tables just in case of emergency. Maybe it’s too thick to fracture.

I asked him how he had felt. As a normal person, he had been worried, of course, but this had not driven him to the frenzy of his own. He said calmly that he had totally surrendered to God, leaving all things to Him.

Of what he had done for his own sake, I concluded that he was the one to comprehend as well as to apply the religious teachings of the fasting month well. Not only he refrained from carnal desires: food, drink, smoking and sex—as every believing Muslim obliged to do so during the days of Ramadan—by the time anybody should have done an extreme for his life, he had gone back to his desk, got the Holy Book of Koran and recited it and prayed.

What a precious lesson! I wonder what and you and I would do if only we were him.