The Hurricane That Hit Louisville

As many of you know, Hurricane Ike went through Galveston and Houston and came straight for Louisville. By the time it reached us on Sunday morning (the 14th), the rain was gone, but the wind was still 75-80 miles per hour. Trees and power lines all over town went down. We were driving out to the Murrays' for lunch after church that Sunday. We were almost there when suddenly a telephone pole snapped in half just about 40-50 yards ahead of us. When the transformer came crashing down, it exploded right in front of us. The top half of the pole was left tangled in the wires and dangling over the road. If we had gotten to that spot just a couple seconds earlier, that transformer could have exploded right on top of us. So we found another way to get to the Murrays', and we all enjoyed lunch without power.

On our way home, we saw ridiculously large trees laying all over homes and cars across town. When we entered our neighborhood, we saw that there were several large trees down. The main entrance had already been mostly cleared of a large tree that fell and spanned the entire roadway. The power was definitely out. We learned that about a half million people were out of power in our area and that it would be 10-14 days before everyone got power back (apparently, they had sent a bunch of our local folks down to the coast to help with Gustav clean-up, so they had to wait for them to return).

Thank goodness I had recently purchased new flashlights and maintained a stock of things like batteries and non-perishable food! Of course, I thought I was keeping them for something like a tornado... definitely not a hurricane. We had also purchased a new cooler right before Ladan's birthday party this summer. Our old one leaked and wouldn't hold ice.

Our food supply was actually my main concern. I had planned our meals really well and had acquired most of everything we'd needed to prepare them for the rest of the month. I was hoping to only spend about $25-$50 more for the rest of the month. Realizing that I couldn't complain if having to spend additional money out of our very tight budget was the worst of it, I still prayed that the Lord would help us keep our food from going to waste. We determined not to open the fridge and freezer so that as much of the cool air in them could stay put.

On Monday morning, we found out that all classes on campus would be cancelled for the entire week. So Chet was home for breakfast! I made pancakes and eggs on the grill. We have a side burner, so it wasn't difficult. The worst part is that a strong wind came toward the end and knocked the remaining uncooked eggs on the ground, making a pretty disgusting mess to clean up.

I decided it would be fun to follow up our breakfast with some coffee. So I marched out to the van and attempted to use our AC adapter to plug in the grinder and coffee pot. It worked GREAT for the grinder, and it warmed up the coffee pot, but I guess it takes more power to actually pump the water through. It didn't work, but at least now we know just in case this need/desire ever comes up in the future. You know, in case we're out camping for real sometime!

A few hours later, our neighbors (who happen to work at Outback Steakhouse) called and said that they had just picked up a box of 24 11-ounce steaks from the restaurant because it had no power and couldn't save the meat. Several of us pitched in veggies, and they invited a bunch of neighbors over to share in the fun. They even had one of the Outback grillers come over and perfect our steaks for us. We definitely weren't suffering!

Then we learned that the seminary was going to be serving dinner that night to the entire seminary community. They decided to serve three free meals a day to everyone for a couple of days (after which their power came back on, and people could purchase meals like normal if they wanted to). We were at dinner that Monday night and ran into Ryan Townsend, our church administrator. He told us that the power at the church had come back on that afternoon and that we could take our freezer stuff and put it in the church freezer! We went home to open our freezer for the first time. Since it was jammed full, everything was still totally frozen through! We transferred it to the church that night and didn't lose anything!

By Tuesday morning, our fridge wasn't very cool anymore, but since we had only opened it about twice, everything was still okay. We were able to find ice at a nearby gas station. It was not an easy thing to find for MANY people, but Chet happened to find it at the first place he stopped. AMAZING!!!!! I did decide to get rid of things like ranch dressing (which we don't often use anyway) and a few other containers that had just a tiny bit left. Otherwise, we didn't lose anything major from our refrigerator either.

Wednesday night our church provided dinner before church. I was at church late for a meeting, so the boys came home first. When they got here, OUR POWER WAS BACK ON!!!!!! Chet sent me a message right before I left the church letting me know it was back, so I was able to load up our freezer goods and bring them home.

I walked in the door, and Ladan shouted, "Mom! God gave us our light-tricity back!" He normally says electricity correctly, but he was so excited that it came out funny. Later that night I was putting him to bed. He walked down the hall to his room, turned, and looked up at his light switch. He slowly moved toward it and flipped the switch. It came on! He was once again SO EXCITED that he started jumping up and down with his hands in the air, screaming, "My light turned on!" He jumped up into my arms and gave me a massive hug and a kiss on my cheek! He prayed that night thanking God for everything that came back on and for taking care of us when our lights were off. Amen to that!

Some people were without power for quite a few days longer than we were. Most of the schools were out for at least a week. And many people are still cleaning up tree limbs and making repairs to their homes all over town.

Compared with many people, we really didn't have it bad at all.

• It was kind of like a camp experience, including the nightly visit to the "mess hall" for dinner... except we were staying in a really nice cabin with our own beds, running water (although cold), flushing toilets, and no bugs!
• We didn't lose any groceries other than a few items we don't use often anyway, and we really did make it through the rest of the month only spending $30 more!
• On top of that, we had meals provided for several days so that the groceries we had will end up going a lot farther than I thought they would.
• Our old antenna works now. Several weeks before the storm, we were having trouble getting even the most basic channels on our antenna, and it was very difficult to get anything to come through on the digital converter box. The problem with digital is that it's all or nothing, but the analog signals were terrible too. So we decided to try a new antenna from Radio Shack. We had 30 days to try it out. The power went out on day 26. By day 29, we decided to return it because the remote had never really worked, and it wasn't really great at getting a strong signal. When I took it back, they explained that these were extremely unusual problems for this model, but because of the power outage, they didn't have any others. I went home, and we figured we'd have to continue the hunt later. When the power came back on, we decided to just plug the old antenna in and see if we could pick up any news (we still hadn't heard anything about what kind of damage was done in Texas or anything). Well, something must have happened during the repairs, because our old antenna works FABULOUSLY now!!!!!!!! We don't have to spend that extra money at all, and if it weren't for that faulty Radio Shack antenna, we may have never known it! (Not that we would have "had" to spend the extra money, but I think you get my point.)
• We got to spend a lot of time with our friends and neighbors helping one another.
• We realized even more what the Body of Christ can do together when there is a need. We were so blessed by things as simple as our friends allowing us to shower in their homes, wash a couple loads of laundry, and store our frozen goods.
• Chet got to rest a little bit more since classes were cancelled for the entire week. Chet's schedule is especially challenging this semester (not the classes, but the times of them), so we were both getting really exhausted. The fact that he was able to catch up more on his sleep was a huge provision from the Lord.
• Our power returned literally hours before the heat returned to town. We didn't have a single sweaty day or night during the outage (although plenty of people across town did).

Hopefully you can see that none of these things are coincidences. And to think that there are probably a million other ways that the Lord meticulously cared for us that we don't have any clue about! That's enough to cause me to fall on my face before Him!