Tornado Alley

Wednesday nights are church nights for us. We probably would go anyway... I went on Wednesday nights long before I joined the choir at Grace (it's very healthy to have a little bit of Word and fellowship in the middle of the week)... but now we pretty much have to go because we have choir practice immediately after the service. Tonight Cathy wasn't feeling well, though, so Mikey and I went on to church while she and Hannah stayed home. On the way there the weather looked pretty average, but little did we know there was something really brewing! Church started at 7, and maybe 15 or 20 minutes into the service, right in the middle of one of the songs, Pastor Geof, who was supposed to speak while Pastor Bob is away on a missions trip to the Ukraine and a couple of other places, stopped the service and told us that tornadoes were headed right our direction, and that we should all calmly move into the tornado-shelter children's building. A few minutes earlier Cathy had called my mom (who was sitting next to me) and told her that the tornado sirens were going off at our house, which is about nine miles to the North of the church. I wound up with my mom and dad and a bunch of friends from choir in the 5-year-old classroom, not really knowing exactly where Mikey was but knowing he was being safely taken care of in another one of the tornado shelter rooms (he was). Cathy wound up in the closet at home, probably squeezing Hannah so hard her eyes bugged out. Down in the classroom where I was, we basically picked back up where we left off and sang a bunch more praise choruses. The tornadoes apparently missed the church and the house both, and service and rehearsal were both canceled. Without the storms, about this time we would be in the middle of choir practice... but instead I'm at home blogging. God took care of us!

UPDATE: another account of the same incident from another dad who goes to Grace here.