A Twister.. A Twister... Auntie Em, Auntie Em

I played in Crossville, TN again last night for a Good Friday service at Calvary Chapel Crossville. All I have to say is that this little fellowship of people has won my affection in a big way. It broke my heart to have to leave when the night was over.

Calvary Chapel Crossville portrays exactly what a church family should be. It is a church of people who invest their time and lives enriching the lives of the other members of the fellowship. These are people who legitimately care and if you are a visitor to this church you will feel so welcome you may never want to leave either. I really connected here, and I hope to go back when I tour again this summer.

A Kind Of Funny Story... My First Tornado-ish experience...

One of the truths about where I come from in the northeast is that many to most people there are scared to death of tornados. Perhaps that's why they never leave there, because is it extremely rare for a tornado to hit Maine. So many times I have heard the Maine locals say (in the classic Maine accent, "I would never move south. They get those tornados. Why would they want to live there?"

My own mother is a classic case of this. My father is from the midwest which is an area that gets a far heavier tornado season than where I am at in Tennessee. He has always told us of the tornados he experienced growing up and has always treated them like no big deal. My mother always called him crazy and said, "I could never do it."

Yesterday, Tennessee got slammed with some big storms and a lot of tornado watches and warnings. As I was on the road with my road manager and his wife, we were listening to the radio to all of the announcements of which counties had warnings and which had just watches. They said that Bledsoe county was under a warning until 4:30pm. We were just minutes away and were heading right through Bledsoe to get to our destination. The clouds were really heavy and the rain was pretty intense. Much stronger than what we averagely see in Maine.

Around that time, I received a phone call from my mother. She was in a total panic over what she was seeing on the national forecast. She had been reading of some of the damage that the storms had left in Arkansas and what they were doing in TN. She told me of her findings (which were what we were listening to on the radio), and then when she heard where we were, she continued to ask me to go back.

I felt bad as I knew that she has always had such a deep fear but I also knew that we were almost out of the storm system and were heading in the opposite direction. The storms were heading east and we were heading west. While she was on the phone, I could barely hear her. The rain was so loud and the cell reception was all of a sudden going from full bars to no bars in a second. I told my mom that I could know longer hear her and had to go but I know the call got cut off. Seconds after I hung up, hail started to fall really hard on us. My road manager, Ken, was driving and he immediately pulled over as the wipers on the fastest speed could not clear the window. Everyone else pulled over as well. There was a bridge shortly up ahead so Ken crawled the van up to it and stayed there for little. It slowed down and we continued our trip. Within minutes we were in the clear with blue skies and even some sunshine. No tornados.

Now I laugh when I think of what it must have sounded like on my mother's end. There she is in Maine, scared of tornados and talking to me on the phone, sharing with me her feelings. Then all of a sudden she hear's the storm noise and hear's me slightly yelling to hear myself saying, "Hello...(noise)....hello (noise)...hel...mo...(noise)...can't..he....ou.. (silence)." I'm sure she was a wreck for the next 30 minutes. I called back when I had reception and she sounded like she had actually been through a tornado. I guess it sounded a lot worse than what it really was. Bless her heart.

Happy Easter,
SL