The Great Wind Storm of 2013

It was a fairly normal Tuesday afternoon.  I was at home, on the sofa, feeding Miles and Jordan was at maintenance as usual.  It was about 3:00 pm when it began to rain...typical rainy season weather.  Then things began to get bizarre!!  We live in a valley and rarely get anything more than a light breeze, but the wind started to really pick up.  Our sofa faces our large front window, so I had a front row view of trees bending and swaying, while small loose branches fell out of our front tree.  Suddenly a HUGE branch, probably 8 feet long and the thickness of my arm fell out of the tree and stuck straight into the ground.  And there it stood, like someone had just planted it there.  The wind died down and the rain stopped a few minutes later.  I, of course, began to rehearse in my head how I was going to tell everyone this GREAT story about the GIANT branch falling right in front of my eyes!!   Feeling that the story may not be phone-call worthy, I decided to wander around outside to see if I could "bump into" anyone who might be willing to hear my sweet story.  To my surprise, I found this:

That would be the under-side of our neighbor's tree...here it is from another angle:

Now my "fantastic" branch story seemed...well...much less fantastic.  As I continued down the road this is what I saw:

Turned out that over 25 trees had blown over during that wind storm.  We are praising the Lord for his hand of protection.  Miraculously, only one house was directly hit, all the other trees fell away from their surrounding buildings.  The missionaries inside the house that was hit were protected by a ceiling beam that had just been installed a couple months earlier.  Praise God from whom all blessings flow!