A Patch of Dry Ground

My brother spent the night in his flooded town in his flooded home with a shotgun, watching for looters that dared enter his home. There is no water, electricity, food service, or any service of any kind open in the devastated Owego/Binghamton NY flood zone. Into this vacuum, the looters came. The National Guard increased its patrol, but my brother must not have felt it was sufficient. He couldn't stop the flood, but he is determined to stop the looters.

I can't imagine what his night must have been like, but I am waiting anxiously to hear from him today. It distresses me greatly that anyone would take advantage of others' troubles as to loot the remnants of horrendous loss. Ninety percent of the Owego businesses were flooded extensively. I can't imagine how this town is going to rebuild.

My brother sent a newspaper photograph of an aerial view of flooded Owego. No streets are visible. It looks like Holland with canals of water crisscrossing the town, with trees growing out of the water. There is one patch, one small patch of dry grass in the whole city. The flood waters rose around all but that patch of grass. Half my brother's house sits on that small patch of dry ground. His house is the most fortunate house in all of Owego.

While the waters were rising, the river not yet crested, and John's wife, Jenny, and son Anthony, were trapped in the house, John had texted me.
"Now might be a good time to get on the God hotline," he said.
"I'm on it," I texted back.
I prayed and prayed, throughout the day, texting back and forth with my brother as the river rose. I prayed for the safety of John's family, and for his beautiful two hundred year old home.
Finally I got the text that the river had crested. And that Jenny and Anthony had been rescued.
However, I felt like John might think God had let him down. The house had still flooded, at least part way up the first floor level. But his family was safe. I praised God for His deliverance. Not a single person died in the overwhelming flood.

But as I gazed at the startling photograph of Owego underwater, with that single patch of grass beside my brother's house, I thought of the rest of the story I had learned later. Jenny had been able to walk across that single patch of dry ground between the waters, to the public phone in the business on the other side of the grass, and call the authorities. Every road was flooded. Owego was trapped in the water. The National Guard was alerted, and John's family was rescued by boat. I couldn't stop looking at that patch of grass, and thinking if that isn't an answer to prayer, I don't know what is.

"But what about the other people?" asked Asherel, when I told her the story.
Yes, I had thought of the other people. They weren't given a patch of grass. But everyone in Owego is safe, and there is much to be thankful for in that alone.
"I should have prayed more fervently for the whole city," I said, "I was so focused on praying for John's family..."
It is not that I think my prayers direct God, nor that they even influence God. But we are told to pray "without ceasing", and I do believe that obedience in prayer brings blessing. It may not bring the answers we long for, but there is always blessing in prayer. And if everyone would bow their head in prayer, they would have no time to loot, or blow up buildings...

This anniversary of 9/11, I have my first book signing. It was the Park Road Bookstore's available date, and thus assigned to me. But my book is one of hope, of redemption, of saving what seemed impossibly lost. Perhaps it is a good day for my book signing, after all.

When there is a flood of trouble around you, and today certainly is the memory of that, I think sometimes the only way to wade through the grief is to look for that one patch of dry ground. The waters do eventually recede, and flood plains have the richest soil of all to start anew, when we find the strength and courage to replant.

Nehemiah 9:10-12

¹¹ You divided the sea before them, so that they passed through it on dry ground, but you hurled their pursuers into the depths, like a stone into mighty waters. ¹² By day you led them with a pillar of cloud, and by night with a pillar of fire to give them light on the way they were to take.

Warnings

My brother has had better days. It seems that while he was stuck in Atlanta, the mighty Susquehanna reached record flood levels and in the middle of the night, surrounded his beautiful historic home in Owego,NY, trapping his wife and son inside. It filled the basement as John tried to book a flight into Binghamton. All flights were cancelled as my hometown went into a state of emergency, and the waters rose to the first floor of my brother's home. My parents were safe, high atop a hill, but the city of Binghamton, and Owego proper, on the Chenango and Susquehanna Rivers, were inundated with flood waters. Even if my sister in law Jenny could get out of the house, all the streets out of Owego were flooded.

Midday, the National Guard arrived in a Zodiac boat, and rescued Jenny, Anthony, and their sweet dog Callie. My folks will have their son living with them again, it looks like, for a few months. When the waters recede, poor John will have to make massive repairs on his beautiful home. He will fly into Binghamton this morning. As of now, Jenny is with friends in a neighborhood near Owego, but swollen creeks cut off her path to get to my folks. The airport is on the same high ground as my old home, so John will wait with my parents for the raging waters to recede from epic, record breaking flood level, and will retrieve his family. They hope to reunite by Saturday.

"Why didn't she leave when she had a chance?" I asked John.
"Because no one thought the river would flood that high," he told me.
That's what Noah's neighbors said too....

Warnings. They are all over the place, and we ignore them at our peril. I am not faulting Jenny. In the two hundred years that beautiful historic house had been standing, it had never flooded more than a few inches in the basement. She had no reason to suspect the river would engulf her home. But it did start me musing about all the warnings in life that we ignore. They are sometimes little things, like sassy tones that creep into our children's voices. Sometimes they are little indulgences that are slowly not little anymore. The occasional cream jelly donut becomes the staple, and broccoli becomes the occasional treat. We go for a run rather than tackle that work we should be tackling...just this once...and that just this once becomes commonplace. Rather than fill our lungs with healthy fresh air, and move the muscles God gave us, we slouch like slugs on the couch, because today we are too tired. We don't notice that today becomes tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and soon the muscles are as gooey as that jelly donut we are now eating in prodigious amounts. We ignore God's nudges to look up at Him, and open our hearts to His pleas, and when His image becomes fainter, we blame it on Him. Sarcasm and anger replace encouragement and gentleness. The rain begins to fall, and falls and falls for forty days and forty nights. We keep thinking it will stop, but one day it doesn't, and it floods the world. And as we grasp at the planks of our homes floating by, we wonder why we weren't warned.

Jeremiah 6:9-11

 ⁹ This is what the LORD Almighty says:
   “Let them glean the remnant of Israel
   as thoroughly as a vine;
pass your hand over the branches again,
   like one gathering grapes.”
 ¹⁰ To whom can I speak and give warning?
   Who will listen to me?
Their ears are closed
   so they cannot hear.
The word of the LORD is offensive to them;
   they find no pleasure in it.
¹¹ But I am full of the wrath of the LORD,
   and I cannot hold it in.
   “Pour it out on the children in the street
   and on the young men gathered together;
both husband and wife will be caught in it,
   and the old, those weighed down with years.

Matthew 23:37

   ³⁷ “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.