I grew up on the lush Oklahoma prairies. The wild range grasses were beautifully green in the spring. They were fed by the early rains and naturally fertilized through the spring weather that converted the elemental atmospheric nitrogen by the ubiquitous lightning storms into the various bio-available oxides of nitrogen that the verdant vegetation below needed to grow. Springtime on the great plains was filled with beauty – and occasionally with great violence. If you wanted the green grass, you had to pay for it with the occasional angry, black skies of spring.
And all that annual violence was virtually guaranteed in tornado alley. The spring twisters in the early 1960s were anything but predictable, and the warning systems were still primitive. So, my dad would safeguard his family first. With each new home project, he built the family tornado shelter before any other structure.
One spring night in 1964, when I was 12, Dad came into my bedroom and woke me up. I could tell in his face he was worried. “Get up now. We have to go to the cellar,” he commanded.
“What’s wrong, Daddy?” I asked, even as bright blazes of lightning flashed through the curtains in my bedroom.
“There’s a big storm coming,” he said anxiously, turning to wake my sister from her bedroom. At that moment, the first wave of rain mixed with hail began to pepper the glass on my window. I needed no other encouragement as I slipped my flip-flops over my bare feet and ran toward Dad in my PJs.
“Gotta go! Gotta go! Gotta go!” he ordered with a new urgency, herding me, my sister, and mother toward the back door as the winds began to pick up and redirect the rain to a horizontal spray.
Dad held the back door as Mom hurriedly led the way to the cellar just over the hill 100 feet to the north of the house. My sister and I followed, with Dad bringing up the rear.
The violence was awful to my young boy’s eyes and ears. As I ran to the shelter, the lightning flashes with simultaneous claps of deafening thunder were almost continuous, causing me to reflexively wince. The wind roared through the trees of our country property, and the huge limbs swayed, shuddered, and bent with the tempest as the blasts battered my body, whipping at my hair and clothes while the stinging rain pelted me. The overwhelming sound and force of the hail, the wind, and the rain frightened me to the core of my being.
In a moment, we were inside the shelter sitting on concrete blocks against the far wall away from the door. Dad stood at its slightly opened portal, looking out, just as the wind and rain and noise abruptly tapered off to near silence.
“Is it over, Daddy?” I whispered hopefully.
“Oh, dear God,“ he replied, slamming and bolting the door as he turned to us huddled against the wall, a look in his normally self-assured eyes I had never before witnessed. He quickly knelt before the three of us and enveloped us in his arms, holding us as tightly as he could.
It was then that the roar began. But it wasn’t a wind roar – it was like the noise of a jet engine.
“Tornado,” he whispered.
My sister started to cry. Mom began to pray quietly.
Dad squeezed us all even tighter, pressing us against the wall as the door began to rattle frenetically as though some massive unseen foe was struggling mightily to get inside.
And then, in another second, it was over. The tornado had miraculously leapt as it passed over the treetops, swept over the top of our home, and continued out into the darkness of the blackjack forest on the edge of the flat grasslands before it touched back down. The door stopped its rattling. The monster was gone.
Dad released us and stepped back. His face was rigid with stress like I had never seen him before.
The rain began again – but now it was a quiet, straight down spring rain mixed with distant lightning.
That’s when I started to cry. Then I looked at Dad, who was still staring down at me, and asked through my tears and trembling lips, “Daddy, will you carry me back up?”
“You’re a little old to be carried, aren’t you?” he replied, relaxing his face, as he bent over and lifted me into his strong arms.
I certainly did not feel old in any respect. I was still terrified. I was very afraid of the path back home, buried in the springtime darkness mixed with lightning and the ghostly trails of a monster that had just flown over our home, now cloaked in the blackness of the storm racing away. No… I knew for sure that I was not at all too old for my dad to carry me back home!
That was the last time my flesh-and-blood dad carried me. He has been gone now 21 years this month. And it has been 61 years since the night of that terrible storm. Since that time, I have raised five boys and one girl in my home – and I have carried and loved them all. Now I am blessed to carry and love my grandchildren.
Our Righteous Father has called us as His poor soldiers of Christ – His Templars – to daily face the unseen forces of darkness that threaten and attack His family, and He supernaturally strengthens and provides for us to carry out that mission. We are called to protect them, to shield them, and lay our lives out before them as He directs each of us.
Yet, even after all these passing years, inside my chest beats the heart of the same little boy. And there is not a day that passes that I do not look up at my Father at the end of a long day on the battlefield and ask, “Abba, Father, will You carry me?” – and He always does!
For the Lord has told us, fellow Templar, “Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the Kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all.” Mark 10:15
Carry me,
You always carry me,
Carry me,
You breathe new life in me,
The love of the Father is always guaranteed,
The hands of the Father will always carry me.”
(Legend – Carry Me)