Father's Day and Tornadoes

It started out a very normal day. I went to church, taught the kids and had a great lesson about how God is our Father and we can thrive no matter what kind of earthly fathers we have. Told the story of the fatherless Esther who became queen. Made adorable portraits with M&M bow ties for father figures in our lives.

After church I had a snack because we weren't going out to eat with the family until 3 since Bryan is on a 2nd shift schedule. I let him sleep as long as possible since he had gotten burned the night before and had had a hard time sleeping. He ended up deciding not to go because he still wasn't feeling well. It was very uncomfortable to have a shirt on brushing against it constantly.

It's been raining for about a week and all morning again so it was unfavorable to do many jobs especially outside. I thought of getting groceries or taking a nap but just felt unsettled about those ideas.

We were just relaxing and pittling around the house when suddenly out of nowhere the tornado warning blared out.

We jumped out of our skin!

I grabbed my cell phone and ran down to the basement. Bryan had to get dressed first so by the time he got down there, I had looked up the weather and saw the suspected tornado was many miles away. We went back upstairs and Bryan watched out the doors while I turned on the news coverage to find out more information.

Sure enough the radar image showed an area of rotation 10 miles nw of us, tracking east. They told a few places that it was heading towards but I recognized none of them. I was trying to look them up while I had one ear on the TV and one out the door. (Never did figure out what they were referring to until hours later.) We stepped out onto the porch to assess what was going on.

We could see the black storm clouds coming from the west of us and a bit of a finger pretty high up and moving higher. Better believe if it started reaching down we'd have run back to the basement! We could see a slight rotation to it very slow. Then it occurred to me to take some video. I'll try to post it here, but it was extremely difficult to get it uploaded to Facebook so no guarantees.

That black turning cloud mass passed just about over our heads! It was fearsome to be sure! It was north of us and as it moved on to the east, it looked like it was getting lower again. Tomorrow I'll put up the pictures I took that evening when we went out to check on friends and survey the damage.