Let the heavens praise Your wonders, O Lord, Your faithfulness in the assembly of the holy ones! For who in the skies can be compared to the Lord? Who among the heavenly beings is like the Lord, a god greatly to be feared in the council of the holy ones, and awesome above all who are around Him? O Lord God of hosts, Who is mighty as You are, O Lord, with Your faithfulness all around You? You rule the raging sea; when its waves rise, You still them. The heavens are Yours; the earth also is Yours. The world and all that is in it, You have founded them. (Verses 5-9;11)
May 20, 2013, will be etched in the minds of the people from Moore, Oklahoma, forever now. It's the day their town was picked up and thrown back down in pieces by a two-mile-wide tornado that packed two hundred mile per hour winds and stayed on the ground for an astonishing forty minutes. It rumbled through town like a demonic freight train intent on devouring homes, schools, hospitals and shopping centers in an effort to feed its voracious appetite. In its wake, hundreds of people are bereaved, injured and homeless.
I know this monster. It ate Wichita Falls, Texas, on April 10, 1979. We'd just moved there the day before. Signed the papers on our new home on the southwest side of town, met our elderly neighbors and were on our way back to the motel we were staying in downtown when the sky turned a dark green hue and the clouds began to curl in wisps from their edges. At the drive-thru of the Wendy's we ordered hamburgers and Frosties. Then the tornado sirens whined their terrifying cry for us to take cover. "Get inside right now!" yelled the teenager at the drive-thru window. We grabbed our daughters and raced through the doors of the restaurant just as the monster put its enormous feet onto the southwest side of town. I turned to look just before the doors of the meat locker closed us in semi-darkness to wait out the storm. The F4 tornado devoured twenty percent of the town, killed forty-two people and left neighborhoods looking like a bomb had gone off.
Our home received minor damage, but two streets over concrete foundations were swept clean, looking as if there'd never been homes built upon them. Even the bricks were gone. We drove in the night with no street lights into the mess. When roads became impassable, we walked with flashlights the rest of the way to our house, not very hopeful there would be one standing. And there it was, its white brick glowing in the milky moonlight. I shook so hard I thought I might come apart. Then we went to see our neighbors who'd tried to outrun the thing. They made it. Many of the forty-two hadn't been so lucky.
In the aftermath, our lives were, for a while, a complicated mess. And we had a house! Bill went to his office from the motel the next morning. His boss was there. "The phone lines are out," he informed Bill. But the red light kept blinking, so Bill picked up the receiver. It was the driver of our moving van trying to get ahold of us. Small miracle. The man was on the highway where semis were taken up like Tonka trucks and thrown for several feet before they landed in desultory heaps all over the landscape. All he wanted to do was get out of Wichita Falls! My parents showed up, miraculously let through the roadblocks, and helped us and the mover get the furniture into the house. There was no water or electricity. The motel filled up with homeless families. Every grocery store in town was emptied of food. Restaurants served without benefit of replenishing their food supplies because deliveries were halted. We had no groceries, limited water and we were hungry. That first night we drove an hour and a half out of town to find a diner where our family waited for over an hour and ate whatever they had left to serve us. It was days later before things were even nearing normalcy for us. It was years later for so many others.
As I watched last night's twister eat Moore, I wondered why there are tornadoes. It seems that might have been what took the lives of Job's kids. "Your sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine in their oldest brother's house, and behold, a great wind came across the wilderness and struck the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young people, and they are dead, and I alone have escaped to tell you." (Job 1) We know God rules the waves and the winds, and we know He sometimes gets in the boat with us when they are ripping through our lives. In fact, Jesus walked on the waves when they were so tumultuous the disciples feared drowning. "Why are you afraid?" He asked them. Really? Because a Leviathan is ripping through town crushing us. But if God understands the weather patterns, they must not be completely arbitrary. Nature is fierce, fueled by highs and lows, warmth and coolness, and winds and calm. Mixing and stirring to blow in from the ocean as a hurricane, to funnel down and vacuum the plains, or to rattle and shake the earth. God didn't say He'd take us out of the storm. Jesus promised to be in it with us. With big and little mercies. Like the lady whose dog wriggled out of the rubble as she was speaking to a reporter yesterday. Or the Bible that was found opened to Isaiah 32: Each will be like a hiding place from the wind, a shelter from the storm, like streams of water in a dry place, like the shade of a great rock in a weary land.
I know there are some who will make this out to be God's judgment on Moore. Third tornado since 1999. But they live in the way of storms. The residents know that. Before subdivisions were built, tornadoes took holiday there, playing with trees and fences. It's called Tornado Alley. Wichita Falls sits there, too, with warnings going off yesterday there as well. I live near the San Andreas fault line. Florida and the Gulf of Mexico are sitting ducks during hurricane season. Nature's going to do what it's going to do. God created it to function. But what I learned from my experience with the monster F4 back in Texas is that He is doing, for sure, miracles of His presence in every life affected by the storm yesterday. Even in the ultimate cross of loss of loved ones, Jesus is in the boat. Walking through the ruins of both houses and lives to comfort and restore. I am praying today that every person affected by the massive catastrophe will feel His grace in a tangible way and see His provision when it looks like all is lost. The heavens are His. The earth also is His. The world and all that is in it, He has founded. Whether we are reeling from the devastation of a weather system or we have found ourselves in the path of a different kind of storm, we can trust that our God is with us. We can rest with our Savior in the boat.
May 20, 2013, will be etched in the minds of the people from Moore, Oklahoma, forever now. It's the day their town was picked up and thrown back down in pieces by a two-mile-wide tornado that packed two hundred mile per hour winds and stayed on the ground for an astonishing forty minutes. It rumbled through town like a demonic freight train intent on devouring homes, schools, hospitals and shopping centers in an effort to feed its voracious appetite. In its wake, hundreds of people are bereaved, injured and homeless.
I know this monster. It ate Wichita Falls, Texas, on April 10, 1979. We'd just moved there the day before. Signed the papers on our new home on the southwest side of town, met our elderly neighbors and were on our way back to the motel we were staying in downtown when the sky turned a dark green hue and the clouds began to curl in wisps from their edges. At the drive-thru of the Wendy's we ordered hamburgers and Frosties. Then the tornado sirens whined their terrifying cry for us to take cover. "Get inside right now!" yelled the teenager at the drive-thru window. We grabbed our daughters and raced through the doors of the restaurant just as the monster put its enormous feet onto the southwest side of town. I turned to look just before the doors of the meat locker closed us in semi-darkness to wait out the storm. The F4 tornado devoured twenty percent of the town, killed forty-two people and left neighborhoods looking like a bomb had gone off.
Our home received minor damage, but two streets over concrete foundations were swept clean, looking as if there'd never been homes built upon them. Even the bricks were gone. We drove in the night with no street lights into the mess. When roads became impassable, we walked with flashlights the rest of the way to our house, not very hopeful there would be one standing. And there it was, its white brick glowing in the milky moonlight. I shook so hard I thought I might come apart. Then we went to see our neighbors who'd tried to outrun the thing. They made it. Many of the forty-two hadn't been so lucky.
In the aftermath, our lives were, for a while, a complicated mess. And we had a house! Bill went to his office from the motel the next morning. His boss was there. "The phone lines are out," he informed Bill. But the red light kept blinking, so Bill picked up the receiver. It was the driver of our moving van trying to get ahold of us. Small miracle. The man was on the highway where semis were taken up like Tonka trucks and thrown for several feet before they landed in desultory heaps all over the landscape. All he wanted to do was get out of Wichita Falls! My parents showed up, miraculously let through the roadblocks, and helped us and the mover get the furniture into the house. There was no water or electricity. The motel filled up with homeless families. Every grocery store in town was emptied of food. Restaurants served without benefit of replenishing their food supplies because deliveries were halted. We had no groceries, limited water and we were hungry. That first night we drove an hour and a half out of town to find a diner where our family waited for over an hour and ate whatever they had left to serve us. It was days later before things were even nearing normalcy for us. It was years later for so many others.
As I watched last night's twister eat Moore, I wondered why there are tornadoes. It seems that might have been what took the lives of Job's kids. "Your sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine in their oldest brother's house, and behold, a great wind came across the wilderness and struck the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young people, and they are dead, and I alone have escaped to tell you." (Job 1) We know God rules the waves and the winds, and we know He sometimes gets in the boat with us when they are ripping through our lives. In fact, Jesus walked on the waves when they were so tumultuous the disciples feared drowning. "Why are you afraid?" He asked them. Really? Because a Leviathan is ripping through town crushing us. But if God understands the weather patterns, they must not be completely arbitrary. Nature is fierce, fueled by highs and lows, warmth and coolness, and winds and calm. Mixing and stirring to blow in from the ocean as a hurricane, to funnel down and vacuum the plains, or to rattle and shake the earth. God didn't say He'd take us out of the storm. Jesus promised to be in it with us. With big and little mercies. Like the lady whose dog wriggled out of the rubble as she was speaking to a reporter yesterday. Or the Bible that was found opened to Isaiah 32: Each will be like a hiding place from the wind, a shelter from the storm, like streams of water in a dry place, like the shade of a great rock in a weary land.
I know there are some who will make this out to be God's judgment on Moore. Third tornado since 1999. But they live in the way of storms. The residents know that. Before subdivisions were built, tornadoes took holiday there, playing with trees and fences. It's called Tornado Alley. Wichita Falls sits there, too, with warnings going off yesterday there as well. I live near the San Andreas fault line. Florida and the Gulf of Mexico are sitting ducks during hurricane season. Nature's going to do what it's going to do. God created it to function. But what I learned from my experience with the monster F4 back in Texas is that He is doing, for sure, miracles of His presence in every life affected by the storm yesterday. Even in the ultimate cross of loss of loved ones, Jesus is in the boat. Walking through the ruins of both houses and lives to comfort and restore. I am praying today that every person affected by the massive catastrophe will feel His grace in a tangible way and see His provision when it looks like all is lost. The heavens are His. The earth also is His. The world and all that is in it, He has founded. Whether we are reeling from the devastation of a weather system or we have found ourselves in the path of a different kind of storm, we can trust that our God is with us. We can rest with our Savior in the boat.
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