In Times Like These

Ruth Caye Jones was a pastor’s wife and a mother of five living in Pennsylvania. Late in 1943, the realities of the war were weighing heavily on the home front. As she read the Pittsburgh newspapers, she was deeply distressed by the mounting military casualty lists, the slow progress of Allied troops, and severe nationwide food rationing.

Seeking comfort, she opened her Bible to 2 Timothy 3:1, which reads: "This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come." Recognizing that her generation was living through those exact perilous times, she felt a strong prompting from the Holy Spirit.

While going about her daily household chores, the lyrics and melody began flooding her mind simultaneously. She pulled a small notepad out of her apron pocket and quickly penned the words and simple musical notes before she could forget them. Her lyrics also pulled heavily from Hebrews 6:19, which speaks of hope as a steady "anchor of the soul," giving life to her famous chorus about gripping the "Solid Rock."

The song was published in 1944 and resonated deeply with a hurting world. Years later, while watching a Billy Graham crusade on television, she wept as she listened to the famous baritone George Beverly Shea perform her song. She later said, "I can't believe I had any part in writing this song. I just feel that God gave it to me, and I gave it to the world."

In times like these we need a Savior
In times like these we need an anchor
Be very sure, be very sure
Your anchor holds and grips the Solid Rock

One writer said it like this: "Our lives are like the open seas—calm and pleasant one day; stormy and tempest-tossed the next. But in times like these we can be very sure our anchor holds and grips the Solid Rock."

Unexpected Blessings

I could hardly see through my windshield because of the slush and gook that had been splattered on it, so on my lunch hour I drove to the car wash, only to find it closed. Of course, we had just encountered a winter storm and the wind chill was near zero. I was resigned to the fact that I would have to wait another day to wash my car.

Since Burger King was next door, I decided that was where I would get lunch. I pulled up to the pickup window and immediately there was water dripping from the awning above, dripping onto the dirty windshield I was having trouble seeing out of. In seconds my windshield was clean!

In the process of living, we sometimes face struggles, but God sure does have a way of working things out. Here's a shout-out to unexpected blessings that let me know just how good God is.

"For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Matthew 25:35

Hymns of Hope: 'Til The Storm Passes By

I was awakened by the thunderstorm that passed through the area during the wee hours this morning. Thankfully, as soon as the winds ceased I was able to go back to sleep. Later, I noticed on Facebook that my friend, Darrell, had posted the words to the chorus of the Mosie Lister song, "Til The Storm Passes By."

Lister wrote the song in 1958, perhaps inspired by the story found in the Bible, in the book of Mark, where Jesus was with His disciples in a boat when a vicious storm hit them. Chapter 4, verse 39 says, "And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm."

Perhaps he was thinking about John Wesley’s famous storm experience aboard a ship heading toward America in 1735. He and his brother, Charles, were with a group of Moravian immigrants from Germant, who were in the middle of a worship service when the storm hit. John wrote, "the sea broke over, split the main sail in pieces, covered the ship and poured in between the decks, as if the great deep had already swallowed us up." While the storm was boisterous, the Moravians continued to sing, while the English people on board were terrified.

Although it never reached her, Lister intended for the song to be recorded by Mahalia Jackson. From his own background of having grown up among minority groups, he had an idea of Jackson's background and wanted to write a song that would be a prayer for a person who has undergone struggles in life. The reality is struggles go hand in hand with most of us, who are always either in a storm, like the current global Covid-19 pandemic, have been in a storm, or are heading toward a storm. Thankfully, Jesus promised He would never leave us nor forsake us, and He hasn't, and He won't. He is holding us fast as we stand in the hollow of His hand.

"In the dark of the midnight
Have I oft hid my face
While the storm howls above me
And there's no hiding place
'Mid the crash of the thunder
Precious Lord, hear my cry
Keep me safe 'til the storm passes by

'Til the storm passes over
'Til the thunder sounds no more
'Til the clouds roll forever from the sky
Hold me fast, let me stand
In the hollow of Thy hand
Keep me safe 'til the storm passes by

Many times Satan whispers
There is no need to try
For there's no end of sorrow
There's no hope by and by
But I know Thou art with me
And tomorrow I'll rise
Where the storms
Never darken the skies

When the long night has ended
And the storms come no more
Let me stand in Thy presence
On that bright, peaceful shore
In that land where the tempest
Never comes, Lord may I
Dwell with Thee
When the storm passes by"

Till The Storm Passes By

During a recent singing at my church, friends Rob and Debbie sang Mosie Lister's great song, "Till The Storm Passes By." Before they sang, Debbie spoke about how God spared her family from a tornado that completely destroyed their brand new home in 1998, and how a shelter Rob had built in the basement had protected them from harm. For me, it was an all too familiar story of a tornado that came to my family's home when i was a small child.

The date was March 19, 1963. We lived in an apartment above my grandparents' garage at 601 Hopkins Street. My parents had gone out of town that day and my grandmother, Dimple Speck, was left to babysit us kids; Mike (4), Randy (me, age 3), Darilyn (2) and Ronnie (4 months). As a storm intensified outside, my grandmother looked out a window just in time to see the tornado that was fastly approaching. With only seconds to spare, she quickly gathered all of us together underneath the kitchen table and then, realizing she could not physically protect all of us at the same time, she told Mike and I to run to our parents' bedroom and get underneath the bed. We were overcome with so much fear that, no sooner had we got there, we decide to run back to the kitchen table.

By that time, the roof was already beginning to be pulled away from the building. My grandmother would later recall the haunting sound of hundreds of nails being ripped out of the wood. I cannot imagine how horrifying it must have been for her to see us running back to her at that moment. She was already holding our sister in one arm and our baby brother in the other. There was no way she could have physically handled two more kids, much less try to hold the table down.

My grandmother was a very spiritual woman. You could always find her sitting at the table with her bible either opened in front of her or laying beside her. There is no doubt that she did an awful lot of praying between the time she saw the tornado through the window and the sound of the roof coming apart. Instead of it crashing down on top of us, the tornado sucked the roof and most everything inside the apartment, outward. In the quiescence that followed, one thing that remained was that kitchen table, and all who were underneath it. God had spared my family, just like He spared Rob and Debbie and their family.

"Till the storm passes over
till the thunder sounds no more
till the clouds roll forever from the sky
hold me fast let me stand
in the hollow of thy hand
keep me safe till the storm passes by"

The Tornado at Beaty Swamps

Shortly after midnight on Wednesday, May 10, 1933, Beatty Swamps, TN ( also known as Bethsaida), a small rural community located in Overton County, Tennessee, approximately 6.7 miles from Livingston, was struck by an F4 tornado that completely devastated the community. The funnel, anywhere from one-half to three-quarters of a mile wide, destroyed every home in the community, and killed or injured virtually every single resident. Much of the area was swept clean of debris. This is the second deadliest tornado ever to strike Middle Tennessee.

There have been tornadoes that have gained greater notoriety, such as the Super Outbreak of April 3, 1974, but never has a tornado affected a community as completely as the one that struck Beatty Swamps.

According to the National Weather Service, it had been a humid evening in the rural Cumberland Plateau community. In nearby Allardt, the temperature that Tuesday afternoon had climaxed at 82 degrees, a warmer-than-normal reading for early May. Haze was said to be thick, and "the storm was preceeded by a flashing electrical storm and a high wind," wrote correspondent Samuel K. Neal in the Livingston Enterprise newspaper.

"This little mountain settlement bore the brunt of Tuesday night's storm when it climaxed into a tornado early Wednesday morning, leaving more than a score dead and as many or more injured," he wrote.

The tornado struck with terrible suddenness. Beginning at Eagle Creek, northwest of Bethsaida, the twister moved in a zig-zag line three-quarters of a mile wide, spent its fury here, and ended near West Fork, a distance of about eleven miles from its beginning. In its wake it left the worst destruction this section of Tennessee has ever seen.

Neal wrote, "While natives of this vicinity, two miles East of Monroe, searched the wooded hills of eastern Overton County for other bodies, residents predicted more deaths would be registered by the week-end. It will be impossible to make an accurate check of the death toll for some days, on account of the inaccessibility of the region."

Houses were torn down wholesale. Barns with their contents, including farm machinery, were swept away as if they had been match boxes. A farmer's binder was blown from his barn to a field 500 yards distant, and was left a worthless scrap of twisted iron. A new automobile was swept along for hundreds of feet and left a wrecked mass.

The horror of the storm was emphasized by the broken, twisted, torn bodies lying in a morgue at the Blount Funeral Home in Livingston. The most touching scene of all was the family of Eunice Cole, man, wife, and seven children, ranging in age from two to fourteen. All were killed, probably in their sleep. They were found near their home site in their night clothes, their bodies covered with grime and scraps of debris.

"More horrible was the manner in which some of the bodies were found," wrote Neal. "Their bones broken into an incongruous mass, and on two, body parts were missing."

The tornado brought its share of freaks. A square of floor linoleum was found driven into a tree; a two-by-four plank was driven completely through an automobile tire; a millet straw was found driven into a fruit tree.

But most peculiar of all was at the home of Will Crawford, whose house was blown away, as were all his outhouses and his barn. "In his chicken house," wrote Neal, "two hens were setting, and they were found this morning complacently perched in their nests under a pile of debris, busily hatching their eggs, oblivious to the destruction around them."

The Ewing Hull cabin was blown away that night. The family woke up on the ground.

A few days later, coffins for the Una Cole family - nine in all - lined up for burial in a neighbor's yard near the cemetery. The entire family was buried in a mass grave under one tombstone.

Ultimately, the tornado at Beaty Swamps caused 33 fatalities and $100,000 in damages. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $1.87 million in damages in 2017.

After the tornado, Beaty Swamps ceased to exist. The only landmark that alludes to the former community is Beaty Swamp Road, which intersects Highway 111, 8.7 miles north of Livingston, 12 miles south of Byrdstown.

In 1993, meteorologist Tom Grazulis, who has written extensively about  tornadoes and is head of the Tornado Project, a company that gathers, compiles, and makes tornado information available to tornado and severe weather enthusiasts, the meteorological community and emergency management officials, noted that the Beaty Swamps tornado tracked northeastward for twenty miles, from near Livingston to near Byrdstown. However, in 2006, Mark Rose, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service at Old Hickory, Tennessee wrote that the twenty-mile tornado track asserted by Grazulis, does not appear possible, as the eleven mile path given by the Livingston Enterprise would have carried the tornado very close to Byrdstown. A twenty-mile track would have put the storm into Kentucky before lifting. Thus, Rose asserts the Beaty Swamps tornado tracked northeastward for eleven-miles, not twenty.

The day before the Beaty Swamps tornado, an F4 tornado swept through southern Kentucky, from southwest of Tompkinsville to northeast of Russell Springs. 36 people were killed, 18 in Monroe County, 14 in Russell County and two near Columbia from an F2 categorized tornado.

After May 10th, the next deadly tornado in the region was the outbreak on April 3, 1974.

Weights

One day, my then-eight year old niece, Cassie, came to my house with my mom. The kids and I were gone. When she got out of her car, mom noticed J.D.'s ankle weights lying on the ground over by the basketball goal. That boy was constantly leaving something outside. One day he was outside kicking a football when he managed to get not one but TWO balls stuck high up in the tree out near the mailbox. Those were the only footballs he had. He tried for several days to get them down by throwing rocks and other objects at them. Elijah and I even joined in the rescue operation, but none of us had any success. It appeared that J.D.'s footballs were destined to stay up in that tree forever.

And then one day, as J.D. would probably describe it, something miraculous happened....a power outage. It was miraculous because the power outage brought Richie Richardson of South Kentucky RECC to our home. J.D. looked out the door and saw Richie standing beside his ladder truck, which just happened to be parked next to the tree that coincidently held J.D.'s footballs. In a flash, J.D. was out the door. A minute later, I looked outside just in time to see Richie using this long-arm apparatus to remove the footballs from the tree. Then, I saw him turn toward J.D. and point up to the sky in the opposite direction of the tree. I couldn't help but laugh. Later, J.D. said Richie told him to kick the football 'THAT WAY' from now on! I can still see Richie smiling as he drove off down the road waving goodbye to a very happy J.D. Speck.

Mom retrieved J.D.'s ankle weights from the yard and carried them into the house. Cassie saw her lay them down and went over to investigate. She wanted to know what they were. Mom explained how that J.D. uses the ankle weights to strengthen his leg muscles so that he will jump higher when he is playing basketball. A puzzled Cassie replied, "Isn't that illegal?"

"And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me." 2 Corinthians 12:9

Have you ever been at that spot in the road where you find yourself in a lull because of something that's weighing you down? And, no matter how hard you try, you're just stuck...like J.D.'s footballs? Even though it may be a hard battle, don't give up. God loves you! J.D. could not get those footballs to move until he asked Richie to help him. God is like that. No matter how far out of reach a solution seems, no matter how difficult the situation is, no matter the size of the weight you are carrying around, just trust in the Lord. He will make a way for you. His strength is perfect.

I need thee, oh I need thee
Every hour I need thee
Oh, bless me now, my Savior
I come to thee