Bloghardt's Reflector

As of 2PM today...

As I said in the post with the sermon, we celebrated the Divine Service at St. Mark in our Fellowship Hall.  It was a wonderful gift to receive Christ's Body and Blood!  I had checked on some of our members living in our neighborhood on Saturday.  It was good to see fifty of our members yesterday.

Our house weathered the storm pretty well.  There was a tree that fell in our neighbor's yard.  An OAK that was fully uprooted.  What's cool about this is that it turned over and fell on his yard.  It was 4 feet from my car!  Had it turned the other way, no more 'Bu or garage!! 

The back of our neighborhood did not fair so well.  There are trees all over the place over there and power poles split like toothpicks.  It's messed up!  Mikey and I went on a walk through there before they cleared the road and it looked like a warzone!

The Storm evidently did go up I-45 through Conroe.  Galveston got hit hard. 

Today, there is no best guess on when power will be back online.  Entergy is reporting 99% outages in their areas in TX.  If you wanna laugh, check out their latest power grid restoration chart.  It's all red!  There is just a touch of restored power.  Their best guestimates are 2-4 weeks.  I'm sure that's a bit high, so I would say a week to two weeks.

We are running on Sophia's generator 5000w generator.  It runs about 12 hours on 5 gallons of gas.  Gas is pretty expensive and scarce in Conroe.  There are a few stations open at like $5/gallon.  There was a rumor that there was gas at a grocery store, but that turned out to be a false.   Rumor has it that Walmart will be open tomorrow, I bet that is going to be a zoo!

I took the two gas cans we have and went to fill them up in College Station yesterday.  Hour drive.  Wasn't too bad.  Gas was scarce there too.  Academy opened up today and we managed to get four more five gallon containers.  WOOHOO!  So, I might be headed back to Bryan tonight.

Phones were restored yesterday.  Phone meant DSL.  When the DSL was solid, I plugged in computer directly and it worked!  Well, it did until Mikey walked through and unplugged it! 

Cellphones are buggy.  I am on roaming all the time.  I was getting mail through my phone before I could text message.  I think my calls are going through now.  My mother tried 10 times to call me after the storm and got "network busy." 

Our life is like something out of Apollo 13.  We are voltage watchers.  Portable AC (800v), Refrigerator (1000v?), fans, dsl (12v), wireless (20v), cellphone chargers (10v), laptop (20v).  HA!  With gas prices the way they are, we are trying to squeeze more out of our generator than 12 hours/day.  We can't afford the $30/day for electricity.  And we can't not cool the house, Sophia just can't handle heat!

Joyfully, a cold front ran through here yesterday and the temperatures dropped to 60 degrees at night!  WOOHOO!  Right now we are running fans and leaving the portable AC off.  Camping out in the living room!

Curfew has been lifted in Conroe.  That's cool, but I don't know what people would do anyway at night anyway.  It's real dark.  The only lights are the moon.  It's quiet, save the sound of generators going here and there.  It sounds like people are cutting their grass at midnight!

We've run out of Mike and Ike's!  Diet coke supplies are pretty good.  Gonna pick up some food when I go to College Station today.

What's the gift in all of this?  Well, it's quite simple.  We are given to appreciate all the things (cellphones, power, laptops, internet) that are part of our every day lives that we take for granted.  The health and well being of our family most of all.  All of these are gift from the Lord.  What's most important?  Christ and what He did for us on the Cross.  All else fails - power, house, internet, even Mike and Ike's.  All that matters is that there was One who took on all our sins, all our failures, all our outages, and died for us.

And this is not some religious tag to a blog post.  This is our life in Christ - with all it's ups and downs, storms and cool days.  Each day, spent in His Name, in His Word, in His Sacrament, spent in His Name.  In His Name means forgiven.  And that frees us to help others around us...

And above all else.. each day spent as gift.  And not only because the hurricane didn't destroy us in Conroe, but gift even if it did!  For as St. Paul says... "For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself.  8 If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's." (Romans 14:7-8)

Consider that the next time you click a switch and the light comes on.  Our lives are less certain than the lights!  But, our salvation, because of Christ, is more certain than anything else in our world.  All Jesus...