"We should have sold the RV!" Danny exclaimed as he arrived back in the basement with a shop vac to slurp up water in the middle of the night last night. All five of us Lucases in our pajamas were waiting out the awful storm--a derecho, we found out later, which is like a tornado except that the wind is straight-line instead of whirling.
"It's blown over!"
"The RV?" I gasped, staring at my son.
"The RV is blown over," he repeated. He had looked out the window during the non-stop lightning and seen the disaster first. This was the RV that we lived in while we built this house, and we had just been thinking and talking about selling it so we'd have the money for other needs right now.
Now it was lying on its side near the barn.
With the sound of the wind outside it was hardly surprising.
We didn't have much time to fret. Water was literally pouring into the basement around the sliding door where the wind was pressuring the rain into any crevice or crack, seen or unseen. Jonathan started vacuuming up water with the shop vac and I ran up to the mudroom to get the mop and bucket. I started slopping up water and wringing the mop in the wringer part of the bucket while Crystal gathered several large towels to stuff into the crevices where water was pouring in.
Lightning was flashing non-stop and wind was roaring steadily the likes of which we had never heard before. Our phones kept blaring with extreme weather warnings. Hail plinked at times on the glass. The electricity kept blinking off--until finally it blinked the very last time and went off for good. We kept working by the lights of a couple phones. Danny was sure our barn was history.
Thankfully, it remained intact, but our neighbor's barn did not fare as well.
In the morning we discovered the neighbor's barn was completely destroyed, with pieces of it strewn over the adjacent hayfield and thousands of pieces of pink insulation all over the place and stuck to the barbed wire fence surrounding the property.
The entire roof for our little tool shed had disappeared, we knew not where.
The cargo trailer that had been parked near the driveway was now sitting IN the driveway, completely straddling it, carried or pushed somehow by the wind ten or twenty or thirty feet from its original position.
Some of our gardens were stripped or laid over, though we think most of the plants will survive. The good thing about this storm was that it brought over two inches of rain with it--so desperately needed.
As Danny went to work, he found a huge limb fallen over the mission office/fellowship hall building in Mission. In the night there, someone's mobile home had blown over with a man inside it, and firemen had gone out in the storm to help rescue him. Back here in White River, we found later, a huge tree had fallen on a mobile home, splitting it nearly in half. Trees and limbs were down all over town.
At our own place countless limbs were down.
At Pastor Ambrose's home, this is what Jonathan found in their back yard--the electric pole fallen over and huge limbs filling up most of Mathel's prayer garden. A friend south of town who actually had electricity was soon to come get the food from Mathel's fridge and take it to her place.
Another view of the tipped RV with the slideouts now on top!
"One thing about it," Jonathan said to me, "there's never a dull moment!"
Well, no.
Right now the electricity has been off for about 17 hours. We are thankful for the generator that is keeping our fridges and freezer and water system going.
We are also thankful for God's Word. A verse from my Psalm for the day spoke to me:
"The Lord also will be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in times of trouble. And those who know Your name will put their trust in You; for You, Lord, have not forsaken those who seek You."
And verses from Nahum 1:3b and 7, "The Lord has His way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of His feet...The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; and He knows those who trust in Him!"
Crystal said she read that today several interesting phenomena are occurring almost simultaneously,
the way the planets are lining up, a solar eclipse, and Jonathan thought a meteor shower was happening, too.
It is a good day to find refuge in God and to continue to trust in Him.
"
Following is a blogpost that I found encouraging and inspiring by a blogger and pastor's wife who resides in Washington where the forest fires are raging and the air is full of smoke.
https://christyfitzwater.com/if-all-is-gray-on-the-outside/
No comments:
Post a Comment