A Lesson Taught During Hurricane Bertha

When I was 9 years old, my family and I took our first, and so far only, trip to Virginia Beach, Virginia. We were subjected to our first, and so far only, hurricane, when a tropical storm transformed into Hurricane Bertha.

Why did God decide to make the center of hurricanes completely calm? Did He do it so that we would have time to gather our most prized possessions, or to give us a chance to collect ourselves for the next onslaught?

Anyway, it was night. We heard a carnivorous, roof-eating wind. "What's that?" I asked.

"The wind's getting stronger," Dad answered, lying on his stomach on the bed across from my sister and me.

Rain slashed every window, and an invisible hand grabbed the door latch leading to our balcony and began slamming the door. We closed it, but the invisible hand was undeterred. It kept on playing with its toy. The storm had arrived. It felt like the lightning was striking immediately above our heads.

Dad went to get some rope from the hotel office, and had to go outside. "Let's pray," Mom said. We all bowed our heads and folded our hands.  "Lord, just protect us in this storm."

Dad returned a few minutes later, rope in hand. "It's warm out there! The owner says that we need to open the bathroom window and tie the door to the bed to equalize the air pressure."

Dad then began to tether one end of the thin white line to the right post of the fold-away bed that my sister and I slept on while Mom tried to open the window.  My Mom and Dad had taken a sheet from their bed and put it on ours so that the metal couldn't poke us all night, but let's get back to the point of the story. 

The window had been painted shut, so once Dad finished knotting the door, he muscled it into submission, and rain poured in. The invisible hand pulled again, but could barely budge it, so the hand just moved on.

The wind still clawed at the door. My Mom wondered, "How can a fold-away bed compete against a ravenous storm?" After we prayed, we got a huge sense of calm, and miraculously fell asleep. Normally, my Mom and I can't sleep unless all is quiet, but we were able to sleep even though a category one hurricane like Bertha can kill.

The next morning, we saw that the "white glass-bowl" street light fixtures, which turned out to be made of plastic, littered the street. Some of the sand on the beach across the street had been washed away, and a bunch of logs were scattered across the shorefront. A bolt of lightning had struck the roof of the Cutty Sark Hotel where we were staying on the top floor, literally right above our heads, but all it did was knock out the TV for a while. How was a 9 year old boy supposed to survive without TV for days?

This is just one of the many examples of how God hears and listens to our prayers.  He is in control of everything all the time, and will guide us through any kind of storm, and He will assure us that we have nothing to fear. A lesson that we all too often forget.