When the Storm Hit, We Found Out What We Were Built On
It was completely black in that hallway closet. Aiden was pressed up next to me and we weren't saying much. We didn't need to. You could feel the storm before you could hear it, this pressure that builds in your ears and chest like the air itself is being squeezed. And then the roar started.
People always say a tornado sounds like a freight train. I don't know who started that, but I'll tell you what it actually sounds like. It sounds like everything at once. It sounds like the world coming apart. We could hear things falling, things breaking. Glass somewhere. The whole house was doing something it wasn't designed to do, and we were just sitting in the dark in a closet praying and waiting.
I want to be straight with you about something. I was afraid. Not movie afraid, not roller coaster afraid. Real, disabling, life-threatening fear. The kind that sits in your chest and takes up all the space. I think people sometimes talk about faith like it's a switch you flip that makes fear go away. That's not how it works. I was scared and I knew it and I couldn't hide it from myself even if I was doing my best to hide it from my son.
But here's the thing. Right there in the middle of that fear, in the dark, with the wind doing what it was doing outside, I kept praying. And I kept believing. Not because I felt calm. Because I refused to believe it would end any other way. I held onto that with everything I had. Maybe that pressure I felt in my chest wasn't just the storm. Maybe some of it was faith pushing back.
"When I am afraid, I put my trust in you." — Psalm 56:3
I kept praying out loud. Mostly because I didn't know what else to do and I needed something to hold onto. Aiden was scared. I was scared. I was doing my best to not sound like it, which probably wasn't working as well as I hoped.
And then Aiden said it. "I've never been so scared, Dad."
I told him what I believed with everything I had, even when my voice wasn't quite selling it the way I wanted it to. God has us, buddy. We're going to be okay.
I meant it. I really did. I just also had no idea what we were going to walk out to when it was over.
My phone kept ringing through all of it. We never lost signal, which still kind of amazes me given everything else that was happening. My daughter was at work in Weatherford and she was watching the radar and she wanted to come home. I had to tell her no. Stay where you are. Don't come home.
That hurt more than I expected it to. Every instinct I had wanted my whole family in one place. Instead I was sitting in a closet with my son, telling my daughter to stay away, not knowing where the storm was going or what it was taking with it. Just me and my boy. In the dark. Praying.
I still can't fully imagine what was going through Carrie's and my daughter's heads during all of that. Sitting at work, watching the radar, hearing the weather alerts, knowing exactly where the storm was headed and not being able to do a thing about it. Carrie could probably hear what was happening through the phone. The wind. The things breaking. And she just had to sit with that. I had the storm right on top of me and in some ways I think that was easier than being miles away and helpless. At least I knew what we were dealing with. They were just waiting for the phone to go silent.
I have never felt more isolated in my life and more held at the same time.
When the Wind Stopped
The roaring stopped the way it started. All at once. Aiden and I stepped out of that closet into a house that was still standing, and I cannot tell you how much that mattered. We had door damage and window damage and roof damage, but the walls were up and the structure was there. I let out a breath I didn't realize I'd been holding for however long we'd been in that closet.
My phone rang. Carrie. She was at work and had been watching the radar and doing the thing you do when you can't be with the people you love and the storm is moving toward your house. We still had signal, which honestly felt like its own small miracle. I told her we were okay. She asked about the animals.
I didn't know yet.
It wasn't raining. The storm had just moved through and left behind this strange stillness, no wind, no rain, nothing. So Aiden and I went outside. He was wearing my shirt, his shorts, and his mother's shoes. I don't know how that combination happened but there wasn't time to think about it. I handed him a flashlight and we started walking the property.
We came around the corner and I stopped.
The barn was gone. Not damaged. Not partially standing. A two and a half story barn, just gone. Completely flattened. I could make out the tail lights of my truck under the rubble. The tractor was in there. The Polaris was buried. And the debris had scattered for a half mile down the road.
I don't know exactly what I said out loud at that moment. Probably not much.
We forced the tractor out from under the rubble and patched a section of fence that had been destroyed. Then we dug the Polaris out and drove through the mud with Aiden holding the flashlight, counting animals, checking fences, working our way across the property in the dark.
Every single animal was accounted for.
Praise God. I mean that with everything I've got.
"The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit." — Psalm 34:18
Carrie called again and said she was coming home. There were trees and power lines down everywhere between her and us, and I tried to talk her into staying put. She wasn't interested in that conversation. About an hour later, headlights came up the drive.
We stood there together on the property, wiped out in a way that's hard to describe if you haven't been through it. Not just tired. Emotionally emptied out. The kind of exhaustion that comes from being afraid and then relieved and then shocked and then busy and then finally still, all in the span of a few hours.
I don't know exactly when the Cody Carnes song started playing in my head, but it did. Firm Foundation. That one line in particular. Rain came, wind blew, we're gonna make it through. I wasn't looking for it. It just showed up the way the right words sometimes do when you don't have any of your own left.
What Saturday Night Looked Like for Everyone Else
We weren't the only ones.
The storm that moved through the Springtown and Azle area on the night of April 25th was confirmed as an EF-1 tornado with 105 mph winds in the Springtown area. Radar picked up what the National Weather Service called a "potentially large and extremely dangerous" tornado near Azle at 10:14 that night. Wind gusts of 89 mph recorded nearby. Power lines down. Trees across roads. Homes damaged across a wide stretch of Parker and Tarrant Counties.
Two people in the region lost their lives. One in Runaway Bay, one south of Springtown. At least twenty families were displaced.
I think about those families a lot. We lost a lot. But we all made it out. Not everyone did.
What Happened Next
Here's the thing nobody tells you about surviving something like this. After the shock starts to wear off, you find out you're not alone. Not even a little.
By Sunday morning, neighbors were already showing up. Not texting to check in. Actually showing up. With chainsaws and trucks and offers to help move debris. People who had their own damage to deal with, their own mess to sort through, still came over to check on us first. That's the kind of thing you can't manufacture. You either are that kind of community or you aren't, and we are.
The utility crews deserve their own paragraph. Actually, they deserve more than that. If you've ever sat in the dark for a few hours during an outage and gotten frustrated, I want you to hold that thought and then imagine the scale of what those crews walked into. Widespread outages across the whole area. Lines down. Trees across roads. Hazards everywhere. And they worked. They just worked. Through the night and into the next day and beyond. It's easy to take the lights coming back on for granted until you've seen what it takes to make that happen. I have a lot more respect for those men and women than I ever did before.
A neighbor came up the road with his chainsaw and got the branches off our roof without being asked. My boss showed up with his generator and what had to be at least a thousand feet of extension cord to keep our refrigerators running. He was there from ten in the morning until nine that night, just doing whatever needed doing next. I was overwhelmed and had no idea where to start or what to tackle first. He added direction to the chaos. That's not a small thing when your brain is still processing what it saw the night before.
And then there was the fire department. They showed up and filled our animals' water troughs. Think about that for a second. These are the same people who had been out all night responding to one of the worst storms this area has seen in years, and they still took the time to make sure our livestock had water. That's not just doing a job. That's family. There's no other word for it.
That's what a disaster does sometimes. It strips away all the distance we let grow between us and reminds us that we actually need each other.
We also have really good friends and a church family who went through this same storm, many of them dealing with their own damage and destruction in varying degrees. These weren't people who had it easy and then came to help us. Some of them were knee deep in their own mess and still showed up for others. That says everything about who they are.
The Community That Showed Up For Itself
Parker County took a hit. Springtown, Azle, the surrounding areas. Homes damaged, roads blocked, trees down everywhere, power out across a wide stretch of the community. The kind of damage that makes the national news for a day and then disappears from the conversation while the people affected are still living in the middle of it.
But here's what I keep thinking about. The community didn't wait for someone to organize it. It just happened. Neighbor checked on neighbor. Someone had a generator and ran an extension cord. Someone else had a chainsaw and started clearing the road before anyone asked. The local restaurants that still had power opened their doors and fed people. Nobody had to ask them to do that either. They just did it. People drove in from surrounding areas just to help with cleanup.
Social media, which spends most of its time being a world-class waste of everyone's energy, actually did something right that day. People were posting constantly. Not drama, not speculation. Just information. Who needed help. Where the damage was worst. Which roads were passable. And the replies weren't long. They weren't elaborate. Someone would post that they needed help and the response was just: where are you. Not what happened, not tell me more about it. Just where are you. Because they were already on their way.
That got me. It still does.
Churches didn't wait either. They showed up with supplies and open doors and people willing to work. Strangers helped strangers clear debris from property they'd never set foot on before and probably never will again. It didn't matter. The need was there and so were they.
"Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ." — Galatians 6:2
We live in a time when it's pretty easy to believe that people have forgotten how to show up for each other. That everyone is too busy or too divided or too checked out to actually care about the person down the road. Saturday night proved that wrong. Not in some grand, sweeping way. Just in a hundred small, specific ways that added up to something that felt a whole lot like hope.
That's not nothing. That's actually everything.
I do want to mention one other group that showed up in the aftermath, because leaving them out would feel dishonest. The roofers. Now look, I'm not saying the work isn't necessary. It is. But there's a difference between showing up to help and showing up to sell, and that difference was pretty hard to miss. While neighbors were running chainsaws and the fire department was watering animals and restaurants were feeding people, the roofing crews were working the neighborhood with clipboards and sales pitches. Not one of them stopped to ask if we needed anything. Not one. Just business cards and estimates and that particular brand of urgency that has nothing to do with your wellbeing and everything to do with their bottom line.
A few of them mentioned being Christians. I'll leave it at that. My momma always said if you don't have something nice to say, you know the rest.
"By their fruit you will recognize them." — Matthew 7:16
The contrast between those two groups, the ones who gave and the ones who came to get, was one of the starkest things I witnessed in all of this. It has a way of clarifying things pretty quickly.
What Faith Looks Like When the Barn is Gone
I want to be honest about something because I think it matters.
Faith isn't a shield against hard things. That's not how it works, and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't read enough of the Bible. The storm didn't bypass our property because we go to church. We lost the barn. We lost the truck. We have real damage and real costs and real stress ahead of us. None of that disappears because of what I believe.
But here's what faith did do. It was what I had in that closet when I didn't have anything else. When Aiden said he'd never been so scared and I told him God has us, I wasn't performing. I believed it even when my voice wasn't quite steady saying it. And when we stepped back out into that stillness and found wreckage everywhere, it's what kept me moving instead of just sitting down in the mud.
There's a steadiness that comes from knowing the thing holding you together isn't dependent on what's still standing in your yard.
"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. 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." — Matthew 7:24-25
The rain came. The wind blew. The barn is gone.
And we're going to make it through.
That's not wishful thinking. It's the most honest thing I know how to say. Because I've seen what this community is made of. I've seen what my family is made of. And I know what I'm built on. None of those things went anywhere Saturday night.
A Few Days Later
The debris is still out there in places. The insurance process is doing what insurance processes do. The barn isn't going to rebuild itself overnight and neither is everything else. There are phone calls to make and decisions to figure out and a lot of heavy lifting still ahead.
But the neighbors are still checking in. The community is still pulling together. People are still showing up in ways that make you remember what matters.
If you're in the Springtown or Azle area and you got through this with less damage than others, consider reaching out to someone nearby who didn't. It doesn't have to be a big gesture. Sometimes it's just a text, or showing up with a casserole, or offering an extra hand for an afternoon. Those things matter more than they probably seem like they should.
And if you're in the middle of the hard part right now, I just want you to know that what you're feeling is real and it's okay. Grieve the stuff you lost. It's okay to do that. Just don't let that be the only story you tell yourself, because the full story has more in it than the worst night.
The rain came. The wind blew.
We're gonna make it through.
