It’s been two weeks since Charley has come and gone and those first waking moments that Saturday morning are still so embedded in my mind. The fact that we had been able to spend the night in our own home was such a blessing! I knew there would be a story to tell and many testimonies that had already come out of it. I also knew we’d only begun to learn a whole lot about a lot of things! As I lay in bed and thanked the Lord again for our lives, our health and our home, I also thought about the fact that life in our county would not be the same for a long time if ever again. That’s not to say that homes and businesses would not be rebuilt because certainly they will. But people will change either for the better or for the worse. This kind of catastrophe does not leave people complacent, which is exactly what I believe God is looking for.

Because this very, very powerful storm hit such a large area it is amazing that more people did not lose their lives. Some of the deaths that did occur were, in my opinion, due to wrong decisions to stay either in their home or even stand out under a tree! Many did stay home and when you look at the devastation you wonder again why there were not more deaths. Even now knowing that we would have been safe had we stayed at home or even in Richard’s home where we almost stayed with several others, it is just not something we would have wanted to put the kids through or go through ourselves. After hearing the accounts of friends who did stay and what they went through I know that we made the right decision to evacuate and would definitely do it again.

The fact that we circled the state ahead of the storm then came back into town behind the storm has taken on new meaning to me in a spiritual sense. God didn’t want us to experience the terror of being in the midst of the storm, yet we could see it in the distance as we traveled that day. We could see it behind us and we could see the clouds to the north, then we felt the winds begin to blow in the east and we saw the storm ahead of us while on the way back. On the way back we realized that we’d hardly even used much gas on the trip—much less than we would have normally used going that many miles!