Hello, .
The last three days have been more than we bargained for at our house. For me it began with a sleepless night on Thursday, prompted by one of my worst allergy seasons in memory.
Neither the hours of storming rain, nor the all-night cat rave helped me rest. Friday morning began in exhaustion. And then at 9:30 the power blinked out. This happens occasionally, and it doesn’t usually last all that long. I had no idea that the high winds that followed
the night’s storm, on the anniversary of the 2020 Nashville tornado, were about to put most of the city in a stand-still once again.
With the power out, I crammed everything hurriedly into my suitcase for a weekend prospective college visit with our daughter. Then I raced off to a coffee shop to meet three seminary students on Zoom. While I worked my way through those meetings, I watched leaves and trash swirl in the streets of downtown Nashville, and I listened to the
rattle and bang of the garage doors at the coffee shop near my daughter’s school.
We grabbed our senior girl when her afternoon classes ended, and we headed toward Knoxville, driving along the I-40 wind tunnel. I started to see more and more reports of the destruction behind us in Nashville coming through my phone. Downed trees
and fierce winds were traveling eastward with us. By Saturday over 147,000 people in Davidson County were without power.
The rest of our weekend included the college visit and time with family and friends. The minutes and hours of wondering when power and internet might be back, turned into days, and still it did not return.
Fortunately, a good friend went to our house with a generator to power up our freezer and fridge. And that led to some new complications, including a couple of hours when we didn’t know if our indoor cats, the same ones I was furious with on Thursday night, were still in the house. This put all of us on edge.
To make my long
saga a bit shorter, suffice it to say we made it home.
The cats were located (and I’m sure they’ll throw another rave tonight, as if nothing happened). We salvaged most of the contents of the freezer and
fridge. And a good cleanout was needed anyway. Much allergy medicine was consumed. After 55+ hours the power and internet returned. We survived the uncertainty, the bits of anxiety, and the foreshortened tempers. No college decisions were reached. And no immediate family members or pets were harmed in the making of this weekend.
Maybe you have had such a weekend yourself? Recently or in the past? If so, then you know that sometimes the best thing we can do is to survive. And if we can also laugh a little, and in the end be thankful, then life is good. For those who lost power, or property, or someone beloved this weekend, we pray God’s mercy and grace.
I pray for you, , that your week ahead is also filled with mercy and grace. And next week, we’ll be back with another new episode of Three Minute Ministry Mentor and a video interview with
Kim Knowle-Zeller and Erin Strybis led by our own Erin Robinson Hall.
Writing as a Lenten practice, anyone?
