Lift Up Your Hearts!

8/14/04 9:00 a.m. This won’t be long, as I don’t want to use too much of the laptop’s battery; there is as yet no estimate as to when power will be restored. Seventy-five percent of Seminole County (us) is without power, and 50% of Orange County. We lost power at about 9:30 last night.

Thanks be to God! And thanks to all of your for your prayers. We have a lot to be grateful for today. We have lost one easily-repairable screen section, and there are a number of tree limbs that will have to be trimmed, as they are broken and hanging. (That will be an interesting project of the kind I will not want to watch, with Porter on the roof. Come to think of it, don’t stop praying yet!

The pool is green with all the powdered vegetation driven through the screen. But we are all fine! Our across the street neighbor had a tree come down—for those of you who know, it’s the tree the Schweizers planted in their front yard. Miraculously, the huge tree came down neatly between their mailbox and their car!

During the worst of the storm, we were holed up in our hall. Janet knit by candlelight. We felt the front side of the hurricane, then the eye, then eventually we started wondering, “Isn’t this a mighty big eye?” Apparently the storm spread out a bit and the back side passed by more to the east of us. Porter took a walk around the block and reports some more trees down. Winter Park and Maitland apparently were hit harder, but we don’t know a lot right now. There were some fatalities, including a little girl crushed when a moving van, caught by the wind, fell over on her family’s car. To that family, there’s no meaning to “it could have been so much worse.” Nonetheless, we are all thankful, because Charley could have been so much worse for us, and for most of Florida.