The Shelter on Galveston's Seawall

When Hurricane Ike barreled toward Galveston, Texas in September 2008, most residents evacuated. But Jim and Elaine Maddox, an elderly couple on 53rd Street, couldn't leave. Jim was recovering from hip surgery and Elaine refused to go without him. They moved to their interior hallway, stacked mattresses against the walls, and waited.

The storm surge swallowed entire blocks. Homes built on sand foundations washed into the Gulf. Structures that had stood for decades were reduced to splinters in hours. But when the water receded, the Maddox home — built on reinforced concrete pilings driven eighteen feet into the ground — still stood. Battered, yes. Missing shingles and windows, certainly. But the foundation held. Jim and Elaine walked out alive.

In the weeks after, neighbors who had lost everything would come sit on the Maddox porch just to have somewhere solid to rest. That house became a gathering point, a place where people brought bottled water and canned food, where insurance adjusters set up folding tables, where children played while their parents sorted through wreckage.

The prophet Nahum wrote to people living under the shadow of Assyria's empire — the most violent superpower the ancient world had ever known. Into that terror he declared, "The LORD is good, a refuge in times of trouble. He cares for those who trust in Him." God does not promise to prevent the storm. He promises to be the foundation that holds when everything else is swept away — and the shelter where the broken come to rest.