Foul Weather

Today I heard the sky scream.  Today, standing in our old red-brick school building, I saw a tornado skim over the treetops. 

We'd known there was the chance of foul weather all day long, so we were watching for it, and it arrived about 3:00, herding us all into the bottom floor halls.  Fortunately, since this is "prom weekend," many students were already gone.  Something that is usually a curse had turned into a blessing as we got our kids seated and quieted them.  Our administrators went outside, became "spotters," and we waited. 

Certainly I've been through foul weather there before.  I always feel safe in our vast sturdy building.  It was constructed in 1928, and its long wide halls feel massive and solid. There is really no other place in which I would rather ride out a storm.  Today, I edged over to one of the big windows regardless of the danger of glass and looked out.  Lightning was everywhere, and then it was strangely still.  The clouds were so dark, and the rain that was still falling was swirling wildly.  Then the end door opened just a little and we could hear it scream.

Someone standing near me told me to look, and when I did look back out the window, the funnel cloud was passing over us, headed to the north, mercifully skipping over us.  That is as close as I have ever been to a tornado, at least to my knowledge.   Who knows what has jumped over me in the darkness of the Mississippi stormy night....  All I could think about was, "Not here.  Please, God, not here with all these kids."  I couldn't even get a real prayer to form.  All I could do was look at them and say that.  And yet, it wasn't really fear that I felt as I looked back and forth from that mass of cloud to those trusting faces in the hallway; it was more a sense of both being somehow totally safe and of all of it being completely unreal. 

I hope I never spend another afternoon in the hallways.  It always winds up being a situation with the kids wanting to run out the doors because they can't understand the severity of the situation or something surreal happening with the weather.  Often it winds up being a combination of both.  Today, I am just grateful that the worst of all possible scenarios quite literally passed us over.  After everyone was gone as I was walking out to my car, I laid my hand on the worn brick wall and just gave thanks, both to the good old building that gave us strong shelter and the God that protected us from harm.  I am grateful to have been somewhere safe on an afternoon such as this.