My New Office

My New Office 2

(where I’m officing now… the church lobby)

This week was pretty unusual. We had some April storms come through on Tuesday, nothing unusual for North Texas this time of year. At about 1:45 (during staff meeting with my team) the fire alarms started going off, but amazingly the power stayed on (in Argyle the power has been known to go off with a steady drizzle).

Because the weekly preschool was still in session, all the staff went to help them evacuate. The rain was coming down so hard, we had a major leak down our children’s hallway (water was pouring in) so we evacuated our kids from their classrooms to the auditorium. It was a little bit of chaos (something to work on at next year’s training). We got all the kids situated, put on some Looney Toons (my favorite) and made sure everyone was accounted for. Thankfully the day was almost over.

It kept raining and raining and raining. After a few more hours, I just decided to go home. I had to walk about 100 feet to my car and got totally drenched. I went on home, sit down for a bit.

45 minutes passed by and I got a phone call from someone on my staff. She said, “Kenny, you might want to get back up here, we’re flooding!” Already, all the offices and part of the auditorium were waterlogged, rain flowing down the hill couldn’t drain through the ditches fast enough and just surged into our buildings. I grabbed my wet-vac and headed up to the church. The rain had subsided, the standing water drained and we started the work of cleaning up. After about two hours of clean up, we went home. A disaster recovery team was coming in later to finish what we started.

After getting home, it started raining again, even harder. We had tornado watches all around. Long story short, I came in the next day and the flooding had spread. Probably 60% of our building had been under 1/2 of water in some places, more in others. We started the long process of clean-up. Disaster Recovery was in full swing.

We pulled up carpet in our auditorium and our nursery. It’s still up in the air if we’ll tear out the carpet in the offices. Nevertheless, we’ve relocated for the next few weeks. With staff and volunteers, we’ve logged thousands of man hours getting the building clean and sanitary for the weekend. Although we’re missing a lot of carpet, I think it is the cleanest this building has ever looked.

Tobyhas joked all week about what great insurance we have… unfortunately we don’t have a flood waiver. Most people in North Texas who don’t live in a flood plain don’t have flood insurance. Looks like the damage is well over $150,000. We’re urging our people to give above and beyond this week to help cover the expense. It’s going to be interesting to see what God does. And what might you ask is the sermon this week? “When bad things happen to good people,” part of the “God drives me crazy” series. Think God may be teaching us here?

Click here to see some video of the damage.