The Lighthouse Keeper of Galveston

When Hurricane Ike slammed into Galveston, Texas, in September 2008, the storm surge swallowed entire neighborhoods. Streets became rivers. Homes folded like cardboard. In the aftermath, reporters found something remarkable on the Bolivar Peninsula — a single house still standing amid miles of flattened wreckage, belonging to a man named Warren Adams. The house survived because Adams had driven its pilings thirty feet deep into the earth and reinforced every joint against the worst the Gulf could deliver. Neighbors who had sheltered there rode out the storm bruised but alive.

When journalists asked Adams why he built that way, he said simply, "I knew what the storms could do. So I built for the storm before the storm came."

Nahum prophesied to a people surrounded by the overwhelming fury of Assyrian power — an empire that crushed nations the way Ike crushed beach houses. But tucked into the middle of that storm warning sits verse 7, like a house with thirty-foot pilings: "The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; He knows those who take refuge in Him."

God does not promise to eliminate the storm. He promises to be the shelter within it. His goodness is not fragile. It is load-bearing, driven deep, tested by every wind that has ever blown. And He knows — personally, intimately — every soul that huddles close to Him when the surge comes rolling in.