The Shelter You Have to Enter

On May 20, 2013, an EF5 tornado carved a seventeen-mile path through Moore, Oklahoma, with winds exceeding two hundred miles per hour. Entire neighborhoods were leveled to bare concrete slabs. But beneath one of those slabs, the Hernandez family huddled together in a storm shelter their father had installed three years earlier. When they climbed out into the eerie silence afterward, their house was gone — every wall, every roof joist, every window. Yet not one of them had a scratch.

Here is what struck the reporters who covered the story: several homes on that same street also had underground shelters. Some of those shelters were found empty. The families had either frozen in panic, tried to outrun the storm, or simply never made it to the door in time. The shelter was right there beneath their feet, and they never entered it.

The psalmist does not say, "Whoever knows about the shelter of the Most High." He says, "Whoever dwells there." There is a world of difference between owning a refuge and inhabiting one. The Almighty does not offer us a theological concept to admire from a distance. He offers us a place to live — a fortress we must actually enter, a shadow we must actually stand beneath.

When the winds come — and they will — the question is never whether God's shelter holds. It always holds. The question is whether we have made it our dwelling place.