How do you pray when a 200+ mile-long tornado is headed straight at you? This isn’t a rhetorical question. It’s the one I wrestled with on December 11 as my husband and I huddled in our basement bathroom waiting on the deadliest tornado in Kentucky history to arrive.
We already knew about tornadoes from our time in Oklahoma. We knew that a “watch” is different than a “warning” and that a “warning” is very, very different than an “emergency.” Watches and warning mean conditions are ripe for tornadic activity. An emergency means there’s one on the ground. So when the sirens go off, stop whatever you’re doing. Find an interior room with no windows. Get low. Cover your head. And then pray.
I’m an army wife. I’m used to having no control over my future. Or so I thought. There’s nothing like a tornado emergency to clarify just how out of control you are.
Tornadoes are fickle monsters. They head straight then veer left. They lift off the ground for a moment then slam back down with deadly force. If you’ve seen pictures from Mayfield and Bowling Green, KY, or from other areas where the tornadoes ripped through towns, you’ve seen one house standing twenty feet from one reduced to rubble.
Like I said, fickle monsters.
So how do you pray when it’s a tornado emergency, it’s been on the ground for a long time with no information about whether it’s breaking up, and it’s on a path headed straight at you? Of course you pray for it to break up–for it to retract into the angry thunderstorm lighting its path. But what if God says no to that? Do you ask Him to send it somewhere else knowing the destruction it will wreak on your neighbors? Or do you ask for it to hit you instead? Do you pray for death rather than injury–because although you’d like to see your grandkids grow up, at least you know where you’re going when you die. But to be trapped alive or horribly injured…
There are times when having an author’s imagination is NOT good!
In the end, I prayed for God’s will to be done and for the strength to handle whatever He allowed to come my way. And to be frank, it didn’t come from some super spiritual place. It came from my helplessness.
I mean, really. What else was I supposed to pray?