I have not had a chance to go to Wednesday night service in months because of my working evenings. Earlier this week my co-worker came back from surgery. He needed to go to physical therapy several days a week, so we switched shifts so he could go in the mornings and not have to burn a lot of sick time. Since I had Wednesday night off now I decided that I would go to church. There had been tornatoes reported in Oklahoma City but that was 120 miles away. I did not think much of it. At 7:00 I got to church and as I was heading into the building I thought I heard the sirens, but was not sure. Dropped Annie off for her group and I went over to 'big people' church as the kids and I call it. While praise and worship was going on, the senior pastor on staff got up and said for us to head over to the Children's Building. The children had already been moved and there were storms in the area that were dangerous. Quietly and in prayer we moved.
Now the area was not chaos, but it was not normal either. Children were in one area, adults were in another but we did not know where. There was a trust that all was OK. As I was sitting their in a long hallway that lead to a stairwell the Children's pastor came down and announced that the children were in the stairwell (which I had not gotten to because of the amount of people, and if we had children, we should get them as many of the kids were scarred. I went over and checked for Annie. When I found her she was just like I thought she would be. Someone had grabbed a couple of balloons and she a few kids were bouncing them around amongst themselves.
Since I knew Annie was safe I looked around and saw the Associate Children's pastor moving around a lot between a bunch of grade school kids. Since I work with this age group, even though I did not have the ministry t-shirt on, I got down and sat with the kids and started talking with them. Most of them recognized me and I could see that they had a little bit of fear in their eyes. They knew they were safe, and they knew their parents were safe, but they were out of the normal way of doing things. To see a face they knew helped a lot. We talked about a lot of things and made sure they were OK. We played Rock, Paper, Scissors, and sang some songs. There was a lot of rumbling and they asked me about it. Now I would not have been there if things had been normal, but I was their because of it and they were.
As we got ready to leave, after all the kids got picked up, I stopped to listen to the radio on the way home. I found out from the radio that Rhema Church in Broken Arrow, not far from where we were at Grace Church, had been hit fairly hard. The image here shows some of the damage.
It is from KOTV.com I looked up in Google Earth how close we were to the church that got hit. As the crow flies it is 4 miles almost due NE. And the storms were moving in a NE direction. In other words, the storm went right over my head.
I thank God that I was with those kids and able to keep them calm. I was able to take a bit of stress of the Children's ministers. It was not something that I pride myself on, it was the fact that God put me where He needed me to be. and I was able to do what He needed.
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