So you may be wondering where I have been the last several days. Well it has been a wild adventure since last Wednesday. Thursday night was extremely hectic. Another guy and myself met with some our 6th graders from church for a fun night of games and a Bible study. After that, the two of us hung out for a while, just talking. That then led to me needing to finish some homework while getting ready for a room check the next day. Before I knew it, the night was gone.
I would have cleaned my room on Friday, but I left Union at 9:30 to head down to Birmingham, Alabama. So I did all my cleaning Thursday night. On Friday, two of us from West Jackson went to the Church at Brook Hills for Secret Church. Basically, this is a 6 hour sermon/worship service led by their pastor, David Platt. He does this twice a year, and this session's topic was "The Gospel, Possessions, and Prosperity." We looked at what the Bible says about our possessions from Genesis to Revelation. We then looked at what the "Prosperity Gospel" is and how it is really not the gospel at all. I may give a better summary of the night later. We only had about 100 pages of notes from the night, which actually carried over to a 7 hour sermon.
At 2:00 that next morning, were finally went to bed in the hotel room, and then at 3:30 I was up again. There was severe weather back at home, and since Madison County (a.k.a. Union) went under a tornado warning, I received the alert through my phone. On top of that, I had a friend camping, and his girlfriend was trying to get in touch with him, so I was also trying to help her out, again at 3:30 in the morning. It was hard to concentrate on what was going on when I was so tired and I was not actually going through the storm at that moment. After all that excitement was over, I went back to sleep, only to wake back up at 6:00 with more alerts about cancellations on campus. Then, at 8:00 I woke up for the final time to my dad telling me to come on home so that we could beat the storms.
We had planned on leaving between 9:00 and 10:00, but since the storms were on there way, we decided to go ahead and leave. I only got about 5 hours of sleep altogether. We had perfect weather for most of the trip home, that is until we got to Selmer, TN. The rain stared then, and just a few miles outside of Henderson, it was hard to see the road any longer. I finally made it out of that torrential downpour and got to South Jackson. We were just a few minutes from home, but that is when the floods came. It had rained so much down here, that parking lots and roads were flooded. I have never seen so much water on the streets before. This was my first flood, and what should have taken just a few minutes to get through took an hour!
I made it back to campus, hoping to get caught up on some work, when my Internet went out. A lightning strike knocked out the Internet for a big section of our campus. So that is why I have not posted for so long. The Internet just came back today! I enjoyed the night by watching the race, and then a new line of storms began making its way into TN again. I never went to bed Saturday night in fear of the storms that were coming. So I kicked back and played a few games and read for a while keeping an eye on the weather.
About 12:30 it seemed as if the worst of the storms were gone, so I went to bed. But I left my radio on so that I would hear any weather alerts, and I kept my cell phone turned up in case I got an alert from Union. Sure enough, I had not been asleep but about 40 minutes when I heard a tornado warning go in effect for my home county. I got up to see what was going on and realized it was not for my town in particular. I was just about to go back to bed when I noticed a strong cell coming to Madison County again. The guys on the weather station said that it would not effect Jackson, but it would cause us to go into a tornado warning. So I went ahead and got up, woke up my roommate, and when the sirens went off, we went downstairs. This was around 1:30-2:00.
Shortly after 3:00 we were able to go back to our rooms, but the weather was not done. I continued to watch the coverage, for there were a few last cells that had potential for producing tornadoes, and I did not want to go to bed just to be woken up again. By 5:00, I was back in bed, and I slept until 10:30 Sunday. Church was cancelled due to all the flooding in Jackson, so I got to sleep in. But I had a couple of friends trying to get home from Florida, and they were wondering the best way to go. So I got up and helped them out the best I could.
I am still pretty tired, but with no class tomorrow, I will be sleeping in late! From Friday morning at 6:30 (when I got up) to Sunday morning at 5:00 (when I went to bed), I only got 6 hours of sleep. I am glad this crazy weekend is over. It was both amazing (with Secret Church) and stressful/tiring (with the storms). But once again, God protected us. Please pray for those who did endure much worse weather. Many have lost homes through the floods and the tornadoes that did hit. I know how hard it is to go through one of those storms, so continue to pray for them as they all begin to rebuild.
Tomorrow, I will return to writing about Numbers, and I will try to write about Secret Church in a few days as well. Also, I bought David Platt's book at Secret Church, and from what I have read so far, it is really good, but also convicting. It comes out tomorrow, so go check it out!
Matt
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