“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. 26 But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27 The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.” – Luke 7:24-27
Whenever I hear Jesus’ story about the man who built his house upon a rock, I remember the late afternoon of June 9, 1953. As a four-year old Sunday Schooler, I may well have already heard that exciting story, about how the rains came and the winds blew but the house did not fall because it had its foundation built upon the rock. But whether I actually heard the story back then, one thing I know for sure is that on the afternoon of June 9th, 1953 I lived it.
You see the day before, on June 8th, 1953, a strong summer storm system formed west of Flint, Michigan. At about 8:30 PM, a tornado spun into life. Within minutes, the twister grew into an F-5 tornado with winds up to 318 miles per hour. Hundreds of homes were destroyed and 125 people lost their lives before the cyclone ran out of steam. But even then, the storm system that produced the Flint tornado was not finished. The system moved east – over the Great Lakes, through Ohio, and by late afternoon on June the 9th, it whipped into Massachusetts.
Just west of my hometown of Worcester, another tornado formed – this one an F-4 with winds around 260 miles per hour. These were the days before the National Weather Service could get out warnings about such storm events, but everyone in my neighborhood knew something bad was happening. The sky turned black and the clouds seemed to be boiling. We children were outside playing, but one after another, our mothers called us to get inside. The rains started to fall. The winds began to blow. There was a slowly amplifying roar like the sound of an oncoming train.
My mother herded us children into an upstairs front hall closet. We could hear the cracking of tree limbs outside, and the shattering of glass. Even inside the hall closet, the sound was deafening.
My mother – acting intuitively, I believe – decided we would be better off downstairs in the cellar. So she gathered us up and we all ran for the stairs. When we got to the basement, it was pitch black. All we knew there in the darkness was that our mother’s arms were around us. It was a good thing she had herded us to the cellar. From upstairs something like an explosion shook the house. A propane tank on a neighbor’s travel trailer had been ripped off the vehicle and was violently hurled into the front door of the house, by the front hall closet where we had been hiding just moments before.
My mother – protecting us with her body in the musty darkness of the cellar – thought we would all be killed. So she whispered to us an instruction. If we got separated, my mother said, we were to meet at the throne of Jesus. 
The rains fell. The winds blew.
In 84-minutes, it was over. 90 of our neighbors were killed.
I share this story not to suggest that it was faith in Jesus that spared our family from being among the fatalities. If I were to suggest that God intervened to save us, it would also be suggesting that God did not intervene for others. That is not Christian Faith. It is self-serving pride, although to the extent that people might find new purpose for living their lives after being spared, I suppose it can be useful. Otherwise, we run the risk of demeaning the lives of others, and placing around the shoulders of their grieving loved ones the question of why God chose to save me and my family, but not their children or spouses or friends.
The fact is that everybody dies, sooner or later. No one gets out of here alive. And the rains fall and the winds blow on believers and unbelievers alike. That’s why the words of St. Paul that we often recite at Memorial Services are so powerful and important to Christians:
For none of us liveth to himself. And no one dieth to himself. For if we live, we live unto the Lord, And if we die, we die unto the Lord. Whether we live, therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s.
And that is the message I hear in the story about the man who built his house upon the rock.
What my mother gave us children in the swirl of the great Worcester tornado of 1953 was a foundation upon which to build our lives – a foundation that has never moved – a foundation that has withstood all the changing circumstances of our lives – a foundation that has remained true and faithful even when we have not been true and faithful.
My mother gave us Jesus.
What a story and what a wonderful message. Miss your sermons.
I remember that day well. We were living in Wallingford, CT at that time. The sky turned green and the wind blew. My cousin and his family were living in Holston, he at work and his wife, baby and her mother were at home. They heard the noise and went to the front door to check things out.The baby was torn from her hands and tossed across the street into the backyard of neighbors. She and her mother were carried and thrown a long distance from the house which was totally demolished. She finally found the baby covered in blood and walked out of the devastated area until she could find a cleared road and a very kind man stopped his car and took them to the hospital. She had walked 3 miles with a completely destroyed knee carrying her child. Everyone survived. Her mother was later found in the neighborhood battered but alive. Wallingford sent a trainload of supplies to the area in response to Worcester having sent supplies to Wallingford when it suffered a tornado in the late 1800s. Memories! Hope you are doing well. Mary Cushman. . .