“Can we now just assume we’re both very grateful that our house is still standing and move on to the complaining portion of this program?” I asked my husband with more than a few drops of whine in my voice.
It was nighttime. I was tired. My adrenaline was depleted and suddenly my body and spirit felt like they weighed a ton. An EF2 tornado with winds of 125 mph had plowed through our property that afternoon and frankly, I was tired of trying to put a good spin (pun intended) on the situation.
I was incredibly thankful that with big trees down just feet from our house and all over our property, our home sustained only minor damage. It was like God put a bubble over our house and said to the tornado, “No. You can do this, but you can’t do that.” A bon a fide miracle, I’d say. But still, we have acres and acres of destruction to deal with.
Life is chock full of good news/bad news scenarios, isn’t it?
The good news? I wasn’t home when the tornado hit. The bad news? My husband was home, doing what guys typically do: standing on the front porch to watch the storm. I knew that’s where he’d be so I frantically texted, “GET IN THE BASEMENT!”
Thankfully, Joe did hightail it downstairs, but only when he saw big pine trees in our yard snap in half and all you-know-what breaking loose around him.
The good news? We’ll have plenty of firewood for years to come. The bad news? It’s everywhere. It reminds me of the Bible story about what happened when the Israelites complained about not having meat to eat. God answered and they quickly found themselves up to their belly buttons in quail (see Numbers 11). Too much of a good thing is a bad thing.
The good news? People have shown up to help. The bad news? They’re sacrificing time and energy I know is as precious to them as it is to us.
The good news? We can sit in our still-standing house and pretend all is well, as long as we don’t look out the windows. The bad news? We have a house with many, many windows, so the pretending can’t commence until it gets dark outside.
The good news? We have insurance on our house and barn. The bad news? We don’t have “tree insurance.” It sure hurts my heart to lose so many beautiful trees.
The good news? Because the tornado spun through our land, others were spared. The bad news? We got a direct hit. If you saw news footage or photos of the tornado damage, you probably got a glimpse of the front part of our land. It’s the place that looks like a bomb’s been dropped on it.
God understands the mixed bag life hands us because He’s experienced it, too.
God loves us so much He made a way for us to ultimately escape this world and live forever with Him in a perfect, tornado-free paradise. But in order for people like us to live with a perfect God like Him, He had to send His beloved Son to live amongst us in a fallen world and suffer a horrific, unjust, substitutionary death for our sins.
I probably won’t live long enough to see our property restored, but I absolutely can look forward to a perfect, unmarred eternal home, one “whose architect and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:10), and I can’t wait to see the trees God is growing for me there.
“… No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love Him.”—1 Corinthians 2:9 (New Living Translation)