The Blackout on Interstate 10

On August 29, 2021, Hurricane Ida slammed into Port Fourchon, Louisiana, with 150-mile-per-hour winds. By nightfall, the entire city of New Orleans lost power. Over a million people sat in total darkness — no streetlights, no air conditioning, no cell service. For nine days, residents wondered if help would ever come.

Maria Gutierrez, a grandmother in the Gentilly neighborhood, told a reporter she spent those first nights on her porch, unable to sleep, fanning herself in the suffocating heat. "I cried out to God and He felt so far away," she said. But then she did something deliberate. She began to remember. She remembered how her family survived Katrina in 2005. She remembered how neighbors she had never met showed up with generators and ice. She remembered how every single time the lights had gone out in her sixty-eight years, they had eventually come back on.

"Remembering didn't fix the power grid," Maria said. "But it fixed something in me."

The psalmist understood this. Crushed by sleepless anguish, he made a conscious choice: "I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember Your miracles of long ago." He recalled how the Almighty split the sea and led His people through impossible waters. The darkness did not lift because he remembered — but his faith did. When we cannot see the path ahead, we can look back at every place where God has already made a way through.