Weekly Wolf: Impending Disaster?

Your writing prompt for the week

Sunday night I found myself in the basement of our church along with perhaps sixty or seventy other people, waiting out a powerful thunderstorm with wind gusts topping out at over 95 mph. Trees were toppled, downed powerlines closed streets (including but the north and southbound lanes of 127), and lots of people were without power. And while all this was happening, I was alternately holding a friend’s baby and going up (sans baby) to poke my head out the door to see if the tornado sirens were still going off.

Let me back up.

On Sunday evenings, our family generally heads back to church for Bible study. On this particular evening, my son was on his way to Tennessee to spend spring break with his girlfriend’s family. My husband was at the hospital, ministering to a family that was about to lose a beloved mother and grandmother after she was hospitalized for two weeks with no answers to their many questions.

Meanwhile, I was in the small chapel with a small group of women, finishing up our study of 1 and 2 Thessalonians and getting ready to take prayer requests. That’s when the sirens started blaring. We all looked up at each other and said, “So…I guess we should go to the basement?”

I checked Life360 and radar maps on my phone to see where my guys were in relation to the long line of orange, red, and purple that stretched across several states and was comforted to realize that my son would reach his destination in Tennessee with little more than occasional rain and that my husband was actually already here at church rather than driving from the hospital.

I walked over to where the men were meeting in the library and suggested perhaps we ought to all go downstairs. The lady who was watching the kids in the nursery was already making her way down, kids in tow. Then I remembered Iglesia Resurrección, the Spanish-speaking congregation that uses our building multiple nights a week for worship—including Sunday nights. Did they know what those sirens meant? Did they have tornados in their home countries?

My husband and I crept into the back of the sanctuary and he told one of the ladies who speaks English, and pretty soon everyone was downstairs, kids tearing around, oblivious or unconcerned, adults milling about, chatting. At no time did it seems like any of us were all that concerned. Tornados are not as prevalent in Michigan as they are in the states to our south, and the general consensus among our Bible study groups was that we all wished we were home watching the storm on our front porches rather than stuck in a basement being a good example to the children.

Eventually the sirens stopped and we all went back upstairs to salvage what time we could before we headed home. Lots of people in the state ended up without power that night (though we were blessed that ours was on by the time we got home). There was definitely some property damage. Three people even lost their lives in a weather-related car crash.

But for many people, nothing all that terrible happened. The storm was a strong one—but it was just a storm. A normal, everyday, run-of-the-mill thunderstorm. It had seemed strange to those of us in the basement that there were sirens and emergency text messages. We talked about how fearful and reactive our world was getting, and the dangers associated with crying wolf when what you’ve got is just an ordinary dog.

The sense of impending disaster was followed, eventually, by a bit of a deflation. Things ended not with a bang, but a whimper.

What if we used such a dynamic as a way to get into a story? Let’s explore that a minute…