From inside the sanctuary we heard the sound of hammers boarding up the windows.

It was Sunday morning, August 23, 1992, and we were bracing for Hurricane Andrew’s late night arrival.

First Baptist Church of West Palm Beach overlooks the Intracoastal Waterway which separates West Palm Beach and Palm Beach. From your church pew you are 10 minutes away from the ocean.

We all were wondering what our church might look like the next morning as well as our homes, our neighborhood, our city. After all, Palm Beach County was the expected target of landfall. I honestly don’t recall evacuation orders, certainly not mandatory ones.

Disorder of Service

I recall the irony of the orchestra prelude that morning being the hymn, “I’ll Fly Away”. When anticipating the deadly winds of a Category 5 hurricane the song was an unfortunate choice but it provided a brief moment of some much needed comic relief.

It should be noted that back in the previous century when the entire order of a worship service was printed in the church bulletin the file had to go to the printer by Thursday morning to have any chance of getting the bulletins back by Friday afternoon before the admin staff went home.

All this meant the selections of songs had to be made by Tuesday morning so that the choir and musicians could rehearse them on Wednesday night. We like to say that Baptists decide on Tuesday what God will do on Sunday. And Presbyterians think that they like order?

That afternoon I wrote in my journal …

“The sun is out; it’s a little breezy, actually a pleasant afternoon. I’ve installed the hurricane shutters. Andrew is passing over the Bahamas and is heading for us. 150 mph winds. It’s eerie to know that there is something very dangerous out there and coming. A greater force of weather than any I have ever witnessed is but hours away. The ducks on the pond have no idea what’s coming.”

“An approaching hurricane consumes everyone’s thoughts. To speak of unrelated matters is really pointless. During the pastor’s sermon the sound of hammers boarding up the windows could be heard but Keith didn’t change his sermon, and in fact barely mentioned the storm. It parallels the tendency of the Church to speak a detached message from the issues at hand, the ones pounding outside the walls and inside the hearts of people, answering questions that they aren’t asking and ignoring the ones they are asking.”

(In retrospect and in fairness our pastor was a compassionate man and that Sunday was not indicative of his nature. But my journal entries have always revealed my candid thoughts and true feelings of the moment.)

The next morning

During the night the wind howled and rattled the hurricane shudders. When the only way to see out is covered by sheet metal you feel like you’re spending the night in a tin can. We fell asleep sometime during the night. The next morning everything was quiet and with hesitation I opened the front door to survey the damage outside my home. There was no damage. Our neighborhood was spared. In fact, West Palm Beach was largely spared. “Well, that wasn’t so bad,” I recall saying aloud.

I took a while to learn that the bullet that West Palm Beach dodged hit the city of Homestead right in the chest. Because of the extent of the damage it took news crews a while to get to and report on the devastation. It’s a sobering thing to see video of a leveled neighborhood and think that could’ve been yours. It’s similar to the feeling of sitting at a stop light in Tuscaloosa and seeing a semi-truck run a red light at full speed and hit cars in front of you. I once ran out of air at 60 feet during a scuba dive. I was back in the boat for a while before I let myself think about other possible outcomes. I have a group of friends who missed their flight in Nepal, a flight that moments later crashed and killed all those aboard. These are all the moments you realize that your life can be altered by several miles, a few feet, or mere inches; by an hour, several minutes or a split second. Life is unpredictable and fragile and thereby precious.

Ramon Presson, PhD, is a licensed marriage and family therapist in Franklin (www.LifeChangeCS.org) and the author of several books. Reach him at ramonpresson@gmail.com.