Tornado

Throughout the past couple of years living in Illinois we have seen some crazy weather. I remember one night in particular being at work at Kirby while sheets of rain literally came out of the sky. We were slow on patients in the ER and I spent a good amount of time standing underneath the ambulance bay watching the rain just pour while the lightning continued non-stop. While this was going on Joel was watching our street fill up with rain and our yard nearly flood.

An interesting thing about Illinois weather is that it is constantly changing. You might wake up in the morning to temperatures in the 30's and then find yourself taking all of your clothes off by noon because it's changed to 80's and sunny. You just can never tell what the weather will be like. When you hear people talk about Chicago as being the "Windy City" that's pretty much the dead honest truth. Terms like heat index and wind chill were not in my weather vocabulary prior to moving to Illinois.

Tornado's. We quickly learned the difference between a tornado watch and a tornado warning. We quickly learned that the tornado sirens were tested the first Wednesday of every month at noon. We on a couple of occasions had to stay in our basement as the alarms went off in Monticello.

The week before we moved and on our last Sunday at church, we were in the second hour of Primary and I had just sat down to play the piano for singing time. Someone came into the room to let us know that there was a tornado spotted in the area and that we needed to get to the center of the building. As the kids made there way to the hallway it became very eery. The sky outside was a dark gray and the glass doors to the outside were being opened and closed by the pressure and wind from outside. The primary music leader made the comment, "God won't let a tornado get us, there's WAY too many priesthood holders in this building." I had to kind of laugh at that. Pretty soon the bishop made his way into the hall. He said a prayer and asked that Heavenly Father protect us, especially the children. The kids then spent singing time singing hymns without the piano. You could really feel the spirit in that hallway. Needless to say, we were kept safe that day, but several tornados struck within miles of our church building. We were protected that day.