"Ike" Was Here

It is about 60 hours since Hurricane Ike left Pearland. I didn't care for Friday night or
Saturday morning in the least. It was a long night of listening to the loudest howling sound of wind that I've ever heard. I haven't been in the middle of a hurricane in about 20 years, but Ike will last me for a long time.

Friday morning was beautiful. I cut the grass and spent most of the late morning outside. The sky was blue with few clouds. By 1:00 the clouds began to take over. As each hour passed, we knew that the storm was getting closer.

Sometime between 6:00 and 7:00 we began to lose our electricity. It would go out and then come back on again. About thirty minutes later it went out for the last time. By this time the wind was whipping up pretty good.

About 10:00 we went to bed. The house was warm. I had covered all the windows with plywood 24 hours earlier, so we couldn't tell what was happening outside. The sound of the wind was ferocious on the north side of the house, but our bedroom was a little bit quieter comparatively speaking. The sound of the wind was awful. We had a battery-powered radio going in the bedroom.

I think I must have dozed off and then woke up about midnight. They were saying that the eye wall was approaching the coast, but the center of the eye was still two hours away. I realized that we may have still been 2-4 hours away from the worst. That was a difficult conclusion to swallow if it seemed that bad at that moment.

I guess I woke up every two hours or less after this point. I remember how they described the havoc that Ike was having on Galveston. It sounded really bad. When I woke up about 4:00 I wondered if our homes would stay together. It really was worse than I had expected!

We got up about 7:00 and went out to the back of the house. The fence was down across the north, backside of the lot. It was a terrible site, but when we reviewed the rest of the house, we knew how grateful we needed to be.

We have two pine trees in the front yard. I guess pines are known for shallow roots. These two trees were planted a little over two years ago. I was surprised to see them still standing and not even slightly bent. Many newer pines in our subdivision did not fare so well. I guess out roots were just deep enough and strong enough to hold during this stressful time.

I am reminded that we also need to have some deep roots when the going gets tough. We had better know where our strength comes from, whose we are, and who is our strength. If not, we will just lean over during the "storms" of life. That is a simple rendition of a complex truth.

Most of Pearland is still without electrical power. It is terrible to be in the dark! That is really true spiritually isn't it? Yet, life goes on and hopefully we will learn some valuable truths from this experience. Thank you Lord for being with us and so many people along the Gulf Coast.