Well, for those of you on Facebook, you already know what I wrote there. The hurricane came through north of us, so we dodged the bullet in that respect. But oh, don’t think we didn’t get hit at all! The forces of nature are so powerful! That storm is still hammering people, all the way up the east coast!
We didn’t get terribly strong winds. Lynn and I have gone through worse, back in 2004, when Florida got hit with four hurricanes, one after another. I did get up several times in the night to check on everything, but we don’t have big trees overhanging our house, and all our stuff on the back porch stayed put.
One amazing thing was the sound of the frogs and Katydids or whatever else those creatures were. I wish I’d recorded it, but then, how to post that, so you’d hear it? The thing is, the harder the winds blew and the harder the rain fell, the louder those frogs and insects sang or whatever you want to call their noise. It was a cacophony, and it was really loud! It could be heard over the roaring winds. I guess they really like hurricanes!
In a way though, the sound was kind of menacing. It was like nature saying, “You humans invaded this land and built houses and all that. But we’re all still out here. And we’re coming to take it back!” There were millions of frogs out there, millions!
The next morning, before light, I was out with a flashlight, checking things. Our house was built on a mound, because we’re in a flood plain. Contractors, since ’86, have to build up the land before building a house, and thank God for that! Our house was an island, with water all around us! Other houses that were so built were also islands. But the poor folks whose homes weren’t built according to that code, they were all flooded, including our backyard neighbors.
When your house floods, it’s really terrible. Every carpet is ruined, wood floors are ruined, the baseboards and drywall all have to be taken out, the insulation too. Everything is damp and moldy.
Thank God, we didn’t get any of that. Our worst trial was the power being out for three days. Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone? Man, this tropical, super humid, bug-infested swamp land isn’t really that habitable without modern air conditioning and without lights and refrigeration and computers and TV and all that! Well, it is. I’ve been to many third-world countries where that’s just how they live all the time. But for us, it was really trying. Nowhere to keep our food cold, etc., etc.
Crews from as far away as Mississippi and Alabama came to help us get the power back on, and we thank God for them all! It finally came back on yesterday afternoon for an hour or two, then went off again. Then, after dark, it came on again and has lasted for hours now, thank God.
I really thank all of you who said you’d pray for us on Facebook. That meant a lot. I was thinking about how to pray, what to pray. Lynn and I joined hands at 1 AM when the winds were raging and we prayed together.
When I was a Word-Faith believer, I would’ve prayed and “confessed” that no winds would hurt our house, etc. But now that I understand things differently, I did pray for God to have mercy and protect us and our new home, but at the same time, I knew that I was one of millions who would face the storm. Sometimes we have to go through destruction, hardship, loss, you know? I prayed for us to have the right perspective on this, and I prayed for the others in the storm’s path.
I couldn’t help but think about the people in Italy whose town was just literally destroyed by an earthquake last week. Does God love them less than me? Of course not. Sometimes He protects us from harm; sometimes, for reasons we won’t understand until heaven, He allows us to experience it. The main thing is to not lose our faith. To not think He doesn’t care. To trust that He is good, no matter what happens.
I once read something like that. A pastor or writer said something like, “Faith doesn’t mean everything will ‘work out’ our way. Faith means that no matter how things ‘work out,’ (what’s that mean anyway?) we still trust and know that God is good, that God loves us, and that we can know that it’s still best to be in relationship with Him.”
I’ll just attach some pics, so you can see how things were here. Again, thanks to all who prayed for us. It’s nice to know we have people who care and who love us.