The Night the Floodwaters Rose

In June of 2008, Linda Crawley stood on the front porch of her Cedar Rapids home and watched the Iowa River swallow her street. Water crept past the mailbox, then the garden fence, then the first porch step. Her husband Gary had died seven months earlier. Her savings were thin. And now the river was coming for the only thing she had left.

Her neighbor, a retired firefighter named Dale Henning, waded through knee-deep water to her porch. "Linda, we need to go. Now." She wouldn't move. She stood gripping the railing, paralyzed, scanning the brown water for some solution she could engineer — sandbags she could stack, a pump she could run, something she could do. Dale put his hand over hers and said five words she never forgot: "Linda, this isn't your fight."

He carried her to the rescue boat. Volunteers she'd never met housed her for three weeks. Churches she'd never attended rebuilt her first floor. A community she thought she'd have to save herself turned out to be the very instrument of her deliverance.

Moses spoke the same truth to a nation paralyzed at the water's edge: "Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still." Sometimes the bravest thing we do is loosen our grip on the railing and let the Almighty do what only He can.