The Rains Came Down and the Floods Came Up!

As I mentioned in the last post, we noticed that it rained A LOT on Sunday night.  Around NINE inches fell in a very short window of time and very few basements could handle it.  Amazingly, providentially, our  basement remained dry.  On Monday morning I was eating breakfast and preparing to head south to meet up with Tom and Judy and pick up the kids.  During this time we got a call from church that the basement had been flooded!  Brandon and I headed over and were shocked and saddened to see the damage.  It is really hard to take pictures of the water, but you will get an idea.  

There are many cool God stories with this flood.  The first is that because the sorting was complete, all the things were off the floor in many locations which would have been destroyed in the water.  It would have made the clean up so much worse! 

Standing water in the hallways.

And the classrooms!

and other hallways...

Remember this pic from the last post... so much stuff on the floor...

The after with standing water.  We would have lots so much!

I helped get everything out of the nursery and a couple other spaces and then headed to pick up the kids. Brandon put out an email looking for help and people just started to show up. It was amazing.  We have so many incredible people at church.  Because the whole area was hit with flooding (many places with much more damage than us) getting a professional crew would take many days or longer and by then we would have had major mold damage.  We are so thankful for everyone who came and helped.

Lots of sucking up water!

Lots of tearing out carpet. 

As I was driving home with the kids I got at least four loud storm alerts on my phone.  I kept the radio on and it kept sounding like the worst was north of our home.  I decided to just keep driving.  I snapped this photo coming into town just ahead of yet another rainstorm.  Thankfully this one had much less rain in it.

Almost home!

Another God story was the dumpster.  Because we had finished the rummage sale and had many things that needed to be tossed we had ordered a dumpster and advertised for a night for people fill the dumpster.  We didn't know at the time that we would need it for flood damaged things, but God did!  We had a great crew help us and a master organizer making sure we used every single inch of the dumpster.  It was a shocking perfectly packed dumpster!

Getting it all in!

A full dumpster!

The clock was racing for the start of the Sunday School year.  So much still needed to be prepped in such a short amount of time.  The rooms needed carpet, things needed to be moved back.  More long days ahead... but amazingly we got so much done in a short time.  God was guiding us perfectly!