The Cellar Beneath the Farmhouse

When the tornado sirens screamed across Joplin, Missouri, on May 22, 2011, Mark Anderson grabbed his two daughters and ran for the cellar beneath his farmhouse. The EF5 tornado — the deadliest in decades — was already shredding the south side of town at two hundred miles per hour.

Underground, Mark pressed his girls against the concrete wall, his body curved over theirs like a shield. The roar above sounded like a freight train dragging the whole world behind it. The house shuddered. Glass shattered. Timbers cracked like matchsticks.

Then silence.

When they climbed out, the farmhouse was gone. The barn was gone. The truck sat upside down in the neighbor's field. But Mark's girls were untouched — not a scratch.

Nahum 1:7 says, "The LORD is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; He knows those who take refuge in Him." Notice the prophet doesn't promise the storm won't come. Nahum was writing to people who knew devastation — Assyria had ravaged everything they loved. Yet God didn't say, "I will remove the trouble." He said, "I will be your stronghold in the middle of it."

The Lord knows you — not as a number, not as a case file, but the way a father knows his children huddled against his chest. When the world tears itself apart above you, He is the cellar that holds.