Tornado

For the first time in the three years I have lived in Lansing a tornado hit. The kids and I were having a great time painting the front room while listening to music. The rain and wind were pretty heavy but I didn't think too much about it, we get a lot of heavy rain and wind here, but then through the beat of the music I heard the faint sound of the tornado sirens and it wasn't the first Saturday of the month when they test them. It was the real 'get in your basement now' tornado siren! The bigger kids grabbed their travel buddy, Jennifer with Joseph, Adam with Rachel and me with the baby and we quickly went down to our basement and turned on the Lansing news. We sat riveted to the television as they reported high damaging winds, flooding, power outages, and cloud rotation in Lansing. We waited glued to the reporters every word and watched as the severe storm moved across the radar screen, then the confirmation, a tornado had touched down in Lansing only a few miles from my home. Later learned it was a F3 tornado. The last time a tornado that big hit Lansing was 1977.
Thank heavens there were no fatalities or serious injuries but roofs were taken off houses, tall metal polls that held business signs were bent clean over, a bill board had been torn off an sent flying through a restaurant window, and many large old trees were uprooted and some had crashed through homes.
What really amazed me, is when it was all over and we came upstairs, it was so quiet. There was no rain, wind, or noise. I never would have known, by how it looked at that moment, the weather had been so violent and had done so much damage to places not to far from where I live. My prayers are with all the families who have lost so much to all the Midwest storms.