Faith Does Not Prevent Storms Like Hurricane Harvey from Happening

For many weeks this summer, God bombarded me with thoughts about water. Over and over, I pondered its power to clean and refresh along with its power to destroy and decimate. I noticed a message about water in nearly every book I read, every song I heard, and every Bible passage on which I meditated.

Faith does not prevent storms like Hurricane Harvey from happening

Did you know water is mentioned more than seven hundred times in Scripture? Jesus’s words to the Samaritan woman at the well are my favorite example: “Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14 ESV).

I wasn’t sure why I kept fixating on water until a category 4 hurricane—Harvey—approached and then hit the Texas coast last month. I believe now that God was preparing my heart and mind for what would happen next.

My husband and I scrambled to move my ninety-one-year-old grandmother from the Houston area to the Austin area before Harvey made landfall, and then we watched in horror as southeast Texas was swallowed up by nearly twenty-five trillion gallons of rain and flood waters in a matter of days. Some of our friends and family members evacuated before the reservoirs were released to their neighborhoods, many people had to be rescued by boat or helicopter because the water rose so rapidly in their areas, and even more were stranded in their homes or workplaces for days.

As specific needs were identified, our central Texas community immediately began to mobilize with recovery efforts. A group of women banded together to load up our dear friend Brandy—who escaped northwest Houston with her kids before the storm—with cleaning supplies, diapers, formula, water, food, and car seats to take back home to several families who lost everything in the floods. Her veteran and firefighter husband stayed behind, saving hundreds of lives in a boat over five days.

Read more at The Glorious Table.