By Brea Lewis
On May 1, 2008, when I was five, there was a storm going through my town. At the time, I was visiting my grandparents. About thirty minutes before we left, we heard the tornado sirens going off, and then we started getting nervous. So promptly after hearing the sirens, my dad wanted us to get on our shoes. We waited for the storm to become a little lighter before we went back home (thankfully we live only a few minutes away from my grandparents). Anyway, when we got home we all headed nervously to bed.
In the middle of the night, I woke up crying. I had dreamed of my family being swept up in a tornado! My mom heard me crying, so she came in to try to calm me down. We sang a few camp songs, then we prayed that the storm would pass peacefully. Meanwhile, my dad went to the back door and tried to see if anything in the backyard had been damaged. Unfortunately, it was so dark (and the storm didn't help) that he couldn't see anything.
When my mom had calmed me down, she went back into her room. I could hear them talking about the storm and what had just happened with me. In the morning, my dad went to go check everything to see if anything had been damaged, and what he found was the biggest surprise! He called for my mom, but in a firm voice,
"Brenda, you've GOT to see this!" (Brenda is my mom's name). When my mom had gone in the backyard, she saw our tree laying perfectly on its side, parallel with the fence so that it didn't disturb any of the neighbors' property. Shortly after stepping outside to survey the situation, our neighbor came out and said,
"Yeah, I watched your tree as it rocked back and forth." He had mentioned the time he saw it happen and it was about the same time my dad had looked out the door. So when I woke up, my parents showed us that what the wind/storm/God had done to the tree. We took a photo of all of us kids on the tree that was down. It was apparently a "pleasant" surprise for my parents, because they had actually wanted the tree down, but didn't want to pay someone to take it down. It was a blessing in that regard, but we kids didn't want it down. Later, after my grandparents had assessed that nothing had been damaged by the tree, they called my grandpa because he wanted some firewood. He brought his chainsaw, cut up the entire tree, and took it with him. I don't personally remember looking at the tree. All I remember the best was the dream, which I can still remember clear to this day. Later, we found out that the storm had "skipped" across town, downing some trees and wiping out an Arby's!