Cleaning up....

Many times, when I've seen flood pictures on the news, I have thought.....but where does the water come from?


You see pictures of towns....restaurants.....houses under water.....how does it get there?

On Wednesday.....it was raining...alot.....I needed a few things from the store, so I decided to go out before the weather "got too bad".  After turning around a couple of times because of flooded roads, I ended up on this road because at the time, it was a road....

You can't see it now, but there is a bridge past that red light that goes over a creek....a creek!  A few hours later, it turned into this....

These are the main gates at the amusement park Hershey Park...we went through those gates last Thursday.....

....the water source?...a creek...

Our Rita's.....you guessed it...a creek...

I am so grateful for the friends, family and even a stranger-to-us that helped us Wednesday night.....we live on a hill and have never experienced flooding in our house.  My son was nervous about....of all things....the electric guitar in the basement and about 9:30 asked us to check on it.


We had been at our neighbor's house that afternoon helping them because they had already flooded.  I felt like we had made it through the worst part of what would eventually be 15 inches of rain....


I am so grateful for that little voice of my son because water was beginning to come up out of our sump pit and out of our french drains......into our finished basement....


We started making phone calls to friends and family....


Despite the fact that there were no roads into or out of our town, a friend of my dad's brought us.....in the middle of the storm at 10:00 at night in truly torrential rain a sump pump.....I still don't know how he got it here.....but he was an angel to us....


We had two portable sump pumps running.....2 shop vacs and then 1 industrial pump and our basement was saved......who really cares about carpet when a few doors down they are talking about replacing their furnace and water heater....


In the midst of it all.....as we waited for help to arrive...I just remember crying "Jesus please....."  I couldn't even form sentences.....my heart was just crying out....

And the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. For example, we don’t know what God wants us to pray for. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words."  Romans 8:26

...although I must confess that I screamed "OMG" repeatedly at the point when we first turned on the big pump and the suction pulled the hose into the house and was pumping all the water back into our family room....but truly, that was a prayer!


We are still cleaning up.....as are many people.....but in the midst of all of this, I am just very thankful for a God who is still good.....for friends who pulled their pump out of their own home to use in ours......for neighbors who woke their kids to come help us man shop vacs.....for a dad who has amazing friends....for kids who worked their little hearts out......and a hubby who puts up with his nearly (well....fully) hysterical wife!

So now, we've experienced an earthquake, a hurricane and a flood...

Hmm....could that Harold Camping guy be onto something??