“Wake
up! Wake up! Get out of bed! There’s a tornado coming!” I can still hear the
urgency in my mother’s voice as she roused me from sleep in the middle of the
night. It was April of 1970. My parents along with my sister and I lived in the
south Memphis neighborhood of Whitehaven less than a mile from the Tennessee /
Mississippi state line. I was in the fifth grade. In those days there were no
storm sirens, no twenty-four hour news or weather channels, no weather radios
and absolutely no advanced warning. The only alarm came with the thundering roar
of the wind, the shattering of glass and the horrific crash that occurred when
part of the roof was ripped off and deposited on the covered patio causing it
to collapse. Almost fifty years have passed since that night but I retain vivid
memories of the scene. Most notable among them are the actions of my mother as
she woke me, lifted me out of bed and carried me into the hallway where she
placed me on the floor by my sister and laid on top of us to shelter us from
the storm.
Over
thirty times the book of Psalms uses the word “refuge” to describe the comfort,
protection and shelter of God during the storms of life. Perhaps the most
familiar of these is Psalm 46:1, “God is our refuge and strength, A very
present help in trouble.” The writer of this Psalm was certainly familiar with trouble.
In verses 2-3 he referred to the turbulence of nature as a metaphor for the
instability of life. “Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should
change and though the mountains slip into the heart of the sea; though its
waters roar and foam, though the mountains quake at its swelling pride.”
Steve W. Reeves,
Searcy, Arkansas
