On Thursday September 15th, Pam and I set out on a 10-day journey to Colorado and back. We were so excited to start out that morning, heading for Amarillo, Texas for our first leg of the trip. We made it all the way to about 15 miles south and east of Amarillo, just west of Claude, Texas when we encountered a very dangerous thunderstorm. The rain was so intense I could not see the road in front of my bumper. Only by looking to the right side of the car could I see the white line denoting the shoulder of the road, just wide enough to pull a car out of the line of traffic. The downside is that when this happened, I happened to be in the left lane of a two lane road, making it almost impossible to reach the shoulder of the road safely. This storm lasted about 10-15 minutes and only by God’s preserving power did we safely reach the shoulder to wait out the storm.
Oh, by the way, did I mention the hail stones we also could not see? It sounded as though a thousand ball bearings a minute were hitting our car. When it finally stopped there was ice in sheets on the road in some places, with two inches or more build up on the side of the road meeting the grass for miles. Here is a 47 second video to give you some idea of what happened. I know in this video it may not seem the rain is as bad as I described. However, we are stopped on the side of the road filming this, and from these images you can imagine as this rain was coming straight into us as we drove.
So, here’s the thing.
Did our car get really beat up? Yes, it did. Will we lose money on this claim? Yes, we probably will. But do you realize, just as we do, that cars are just “things”, and money is so temporary as to have almost no eternal value?
What matters is that as I have testified so much in the last few years… what matters is that God is sovereignly in control, that His Word is the sole authority for our lives, and the HE IS PRESENT with us everywhere, all the time!!! Praise God! He kept us in this storm. We look back at how many 18-wheelers just barreled past us going extremely fast and stand amazed that many people didn’t die.
Pam and I proclaim it to be the Preserving Power of Jesus Christ the LORD, who is God over all things. Even for us, in the midst of the storm.
Praise His name. Say His name. There is power in the name “Jesus.”
As I was saying... 