When Fay Came to Visit

It’s been a long time since I have put any thoughts on paper that aren’t related to school (I went back to finish college in the fall of 2006 and hope to be done by the end of 2009), but it’s also been a while since we were impacted by a named storm. In this case it was called Tropical Storm Fay.

The last time we felt the power of one of these named storms was back in 2004 when Hurricane Frances came sightseeing. She followed on the heels of Hurricanes Bonnie and Charley, a pair of mild-mannered storms that got us all excited but then pulled their punches at the last moment. Frances dropped about 13-inhces of rain, I think, and blew hard for several days.

Fay was not nice to Florida, but she never came all the way up into Georgia and we just got a taste of her mean temper. Just a half-hour south, in Jacksonville, FL, they got flooding and massive power outages and numerous trees falling on houses, cars and people. There were pictures on tv of cars in water practically up to their roof, houses with water lapping at the bottoms of the first floor windows, and giant live oaks that had splt houses in two and completely flattened cars - one while it was being driven (the driver died instantly).

We got about five-and-a-half inches of rain over two days, and winds of 30-40 mph with higher gusts. I didn’t see it personally, but there was some minor flooding/storm surge in downtown St. Marys near the waterfront, a result of an abnormally high tide. We were not without power at our house, but news reports say that some parts of our area were powerless for part of Thursday night, the end of the first day of Fay’s visit.

Newspapers and The Weather Channel have been talking a lot about snakes and alligators seeking refuge in peoples’ houses, but we’ve had no freeloaders here.

A half-hour to the north, at Brunswick and St. Simon’s Island, there are reports of flooding and damage, and I saw a picture in the paper of someone on St. Simon’s Island with a couple of feet of water in their yard, but that has not been our experience. And I’m fine with that!

When I went for my walk Friday morning, there was a lot of debris in the streets, but mainly pine straw, oak leaves and small branches. I saw only three small trees that had toppled in the night, and two were clearly long dead, and none of them were out in the street. There was only one that forced me off the sidewalk. By Friday evening, there was another large limb that had come down and was lying across the sidewalk, but that was about it for our neighborhood.

I don’t say this to minimize anyone else’s experience, or to boast of our own good fortune. God is good all the time; and all the time God is good. That doesn’t mean God only allows good things to happen and all bad things are of the devil. Rain falls on the just and the unjust and bad things happen to good people. When bad things happen, His people act as His arms and hands and feet, loving, blessing and helping hurt, devastated people. When people ask, where was God in this mess, the answer is that He is there helping people put lives back together after a natural disaster.

God is not Santa Claus who gives you only the good things that you want or your own personal bodyguard to keep all the stink off of you while you do whatever you want. You can’t just look to Him in bad times or when threatened. He is there for you every day, waiting for you to realize it.

Fay has come and gone from our neck of the woods. She shook down some of the dead branches that we were meaning to get at, and she helped refill our aquifers after two years of drought, but that doesn’t mean we want her to come back. Besides, there’s some more posers out in the ocean refining their act and hoping to come to town in the near future.

As for me, I’ll take some wind and rain over three feet of snow, snowdrift over my head, and 50-below wind chills any day.