A Scary Night

Being a native of Colorado, I know how our weather can change and many times it does. Yet, never in all the years that I have lived in Colorado has the weather been so frightening as last night. For the past three weeks, maybe four weeks, it has rained daily. On the news I hear about golf size hail in different parts of the city but my area is hit by hail a little bit larger than peas. No big deal because the storms never last long and somehow the sun manages to burst through the gray clouds. If the storm is during the night, I can watch it on television as weather persons give the latest reports.

Last night it was different. There was no watching of television because my Dish must have had too much hail and rain bouncing off of it. I could hear the hail hitting my roof and windows. When I heard the hail hit a window I had a fear that the window might shatter. On my roof it sounded like many small animals running all over the roof. The house would light up from the lightning and the thunder seemed to explode right over my home.

Even though I have always heard to stay away from windows and doors during a storm, I opened the front door to look out. The tiny balls of hail seemed to be jumping around my driveway. The lightning did not rest but continued flashing like a light show. No sooner did one bright sky end when another one or two flashes would light up the sky again. It was a continuous show of light!  It was scary and I closed the door.

This time the storm did not end within a few minutes but kept on pounding my roof for a least forty minutes.
God's name and all the saints were on my lips. Fear does bring one closer to God! Even after I went to bed around eleven, I could hear an occasional sound like rocks rolling off my roof. I listened to see if I would hear water leaking and I sniffed to see if I would smell burning from a lightning strike but other than the rain or hail hitting my roof everything seemed okay. I must have fallen asleep and if the storm continued I was not aware of it. This morning I thought the world was back to normal until on my television screen I saw  areas where hail looked like ankle deep snow, flood warnings, and that seven tornadoes had been reported last night! Sometimes it better not to know because the saying of "what you don't know can't hurt you" rings true.

"I grew up in Texas but that was twenty

years ago. Last year in Ft. Worth, 

they had hail the size of softballs. 

We're seeing more and more 

powerful storms of all types, 

almost on biblical level."

Bill Paxton