It Was a Dark and Stormy Night....or...The Most Exciting Wednesday Night Church Service I've Been to Yet

Yes, now there's a lot of work for the deacons at church, yes, people got pretty scared, but last night was, to my teenage mind, one of the most interesting times I've had after church! Wondering why? Well, read on.

At the beginning of our midweek service, despite the overcast sky and possibility of rain, everything seemed fine. Midway through the sermon, it started raining. Soon, there was a downpour and with the combo of that, thunder, and lightning, it was pretty hard to hear the pastor preaching. It did add intersting sound effects. Then the lights momentarily went out! You can hear it in the sermon recording from last night.

Later on, I happened to turn around (face it, with all that going on, who's able to give their full attention to the sermon? *grin*), and I saw my dad motioning me to come out into the vestibule. He was standing next to the stairway going next to the basement and looked rather puzzled. He told me to check out what was going on down there. As I started to go down the steps, I heard water falling. Uh oh. There was water gushing through the window in the bathroom into an inch-deep lake the floor! For some reason, memories of Niagara Falls popped into my mind.

re-enactment of Noah's flood

I ran back up and told my dad what was going on; he told me to get one of the deacons. I showed him the "incident" and while everyone else was singing the closing hymn, (probably suspicious from seeing me walk in the sanctuary and grab a deacon) he got the shop vac out and started getting some of the water up. Soon there were a bunch of other people downstairs, and somebody came to their senses quickly enough to ask the brilliant question of whether or not there were other windows with the same problem. Sure enough, we ran into the "fellowship hall" as they call it, and there was another water-bearing window.

That's bad. Very bad. Not your typical, "Eh, this is lame" bad, but "Boy are we in for it!" bad. You see, we have a preschool that rents out that room, so all their stuff is in there.....right next to the aforesaid window. Not good.

trying to get the kiddie toys out of the water

There's a parsonage attached to the church, so I went to see if there was water coming into the basement in there. Yup. The floor was nearly covered in water in one of the storage rooms.

that was one wet carpet

I got back upstairs, and another deacon asked if he could use my camera to take pictures of what was going on outside. He and my parents kept coming in and out in the rain. A bunch of people gathered around the window and were talking about what we should do, since the rain was coming in through the window wells, and so the same deacon and one of our elders went out to take one more look. They were just outside the door when I heard what sounded like a canon go off; they scrambled back inside. Lightning had struck about 10 or 15 feet away from them! Everyone saw it but me. Figures. Being the good Calvinists that we are, we took it that God didn't want us going outside again!

After we all recovered from that, we went back downstairs and started mopping. The water had traveled from the paneled room out into another part of the basement so we started pushing it into a back room with a drain in the floor. There weren't enough mops, so we had to use brooms. It was.....interesting. One thing I learned: Brooms only work for about 10 minutes.

my sandals were soaked after that

My sister came into the room with a squeegie (or however you spell that) she found somewhere and started wiping the floor with it. I was convinced she was a genius.

brilliant younger siblings are very handy

After we got that "cleaned" up, we went back upstairs after doing more gawking, joking about how we could make a movie titled "Stranded at the Baptist Church" and wondering if there was any food available. Since there wasn't too much else we could do, we decided to go home. We left with my dad's fellow deacons spreading paperwork all over the desk in their office. The rain had just stopped. When we drove out of the car port, it started to downpour again........I wonder how long they stayed there last night!

Here's my dad's version of the story.