After a busy week, we are all moved in! Moving is such a long, tiring, fun, exciting, tiring, costly process. We are loving our new house we are renting and can’t wait to post updates about how it’s going. I will say that not having to tell my kids “Shhh…be quiet…people are still sleeping next door” is a very, very freeing thing. I will also say that we had a whole lot stuffed into closets into our apartment – geez, it held a ton! We started our new house off with a bang – we moved on Wednesday (not getting everything in until 4:30 that day – mostly because taking things down 21 floors on an elevator takes quite a while and Parker Towers wrote down the wrong day we were moving and stopped our movers and tried to charge us $1000 for moving on the wrong day even though it was their mistake), had our small group over on Thursday night, had staff meeting here on Friday, and had 4 friends from Raleigh stay in our basement Friday am through Sunday am. So fun and so crazy!
But even in the midst of moving in, my heart has been so heavy. Even though Hurricane Florence hit over a week ago, my hometown (Georgetown, SC) is just now facing a crisis from it. As you can see from the map, one of the things I love best about Georgetown is all the water access – rivers, inlets, ocean, creeks, etc. That’s because 4 major rivers run from all over down into Georgetown and take Winyah Bay to get routed out to the ocean. Because many of those rivers got flooded and overrun with water because of Hurricane Florence, all that water is making its way down to Georgetown as I am typing.
Think of it like this – when 4 lines are trying to merge into 1 on the highway, traffic backs way up. Essentially, 4 rivers are waiting to get out into Winyah Bay and since they are overloaded with water, the water has to go somewhere, which is going to cause intense flooding. They are using words like historic, catastrophic, unprecedented. It is one thing for them to use words like this, its another for the town to be flooded with Army National Guard building a raft bridge to use to get across waterways when bridges are overflooded with water. Its another to see a local church housing tons of state troopers who have come in for this. Its another for search and rescue teams to be assembling from places as far away as Texas to help people. My friend showed me this picture she took as she was driving through Georgetown yesterday.
They sent out a website where you could go and see your house and see how much flooding was expected. My parents look okay right now even though a creek will overflow into their yard, but my granny is expected to have 5-10 feet of flooding, so they moved out all her furniture and heirlooms and put other things up high on shelves. The intense flooding isn’t scheduled to start until Wednesday and then take 3-4 days until it crests, so this event will be happening for over a week. School was canceled today because they are using it as a shelter and is closed indefinitely.
Would you pray with me? Pray that the flooding isn’t nearly as bad as they think it will be? Pray that people would heed the warnings and get out of dodge? Pray for so many dear friends and family members who are being affected by this? Pray that even something like this will cause people to turn to God and trust in Him like they never have before and that He will be glorified even in the midst of something so bad? I have lived their my entire life and nothing like this has ever happened – it is insane and so scary! Thanks for praying!