Some notes from living without power in Lansing, Michigan
LANSING ICE STORM: My neighbor Gary Valdez and his son deserve to be in Hall of Fame

My reaction to the "Lansing Ice Storm 13" will be in pieces as my brain thaws out

Starbucks England mug
We are starting to get our routine back and its warm inside.

As my wife and I sat on our couch with hot cups of coffee and with the furnace humming a song in the background, we reflected on the ice storm that we experienced and what it meant to be driven from our home by extreme cold.

Our reaction is breaking off our brains in small pieces, like the ice that coated everything outside our house.  And I'm going to try and put them up for everybody to read and react to.  The experience was difficult and a good chunk of that came from uncertainty about the length of the outage and how it would affect our house.  Our house went down to 34.  The fireplace only heated the space right in front of it.

But, as we sort through this, I keep getting back to one thing.  We got through it.  Nobody got sick, especially our daughter-in-law who has some special health needs right now and the only damage to our house was from a big tree branch that took out a section of fence.

Our credit card bills will be a little bigger and we will have to throw some food out.  We were able to find motels in Jackson and Ionia.  We heard stories from people drinking coffee in the lobby about how they were driven from their small towns.  There were young ones and many who were on the plus side of being senior citizens.

My eyes and my heart was opened by a stint of circumstances.  

What am I trying to say?  We--me, my wife, my son and daughter-in-law from Las Vegas, have a lot to thank God for as we look over our shoulder.  There's a Christian song that sticks in my mind.  It's by Matt Redman and called 10,000 Reasons.  I feel like I saw first-hand many of those reasons during the past several days.

I will write more as I unpack this in my head.  This is the song:

 

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