The Donut Tornado

Two Truths And How Am I Alive?

It’s Sunday night, and there are massive storms all over the eastern side of America right now. Tornadoes and straight-line winds up to 70 miles an hour are popping up to the east of us as the major front makes its way to Nashville.

I’m reminded of the two tornadoes I’ve seen with my own eyes.

The first was toward the end of my freshman year of college.

A storm had been brewing, and our college was annoying us with warnings and threatening to send us all to the dorm basements for shelter. I wasn’t buying it.

My buddy Cason Cooley grew up in Kansas, and I grew up in Illinois. We had both heard so many false-alarm tornado sirens that neither of us ever took them seriously.

It had just started to rain a little bit and, sure enough, sirens were beginning to wail. Whatever. Cason needed a ride to pick his car up from a shop downtown and, since we knew that sirens didn’t ever amount to anything, we headed off to get it.

The shop was only about ten minutes from our dorms, but in that ten minutes winds and lightning were really picking up. By the time we got there, the storm was screaming.

We ended up standing there in the garage with a bunch of mechanics, holding on to the support posts and watching out the open garage door. (The wind was too strong now to close it.)

As we stood there in that shop on 7th Ave., we saw roofs of the buildings across from us on 6th start to lift up, and a few fully flew away.

The sky was dark, and it was hard to tell what we were seeing, but when we got back to school a few hours later we learned that a tornado had gone straight down 5th Ave., eventually hitting the new Bridgestone Arena and ripping through its giant 100-ft-tall entry wall of huge windows.

All our friends had indeed been sent to the dorm basements.

So, fine. Sometimes the sirens aren’t totally wrong.

But the story I really want to tell you happened a few years later.

I was driving back from Nashville to visit my family in Illinois. This was in the olden days before cell phones. Or at least before I had one. Definitely before GPS and maps that moved with you.

True story: I toured the country for five years in a 15-passenger van with a bunch of other dudes in their late teens and early 20s with nothing but an atlas.

And we survived!!

Anyway… I was somewhere in southern Illinois when a massive storm came out of nowhere. I’m sure if I had had a weather app I would have known better than to be driving through that area, or if I had been listening to the radio I would have pulled over earlier. But I was probably listening to a CD, maybe even a tape, just lost in my own thoughts on a drive by myself, as you did back then.

Eventually, the storm got so crazy that I could barely see. The wind was blowing me to the left and the right on the road, and there were very few cars anywhere. I was probably driving 10 or 15 mph and hoping desperately to find an exit where I could get off the interstate and park somewhere to wait out the storm.

In southern Illinois, though, you might have to drive 15 or 20 miles for another town. There’s just not a lot down there.

The sky had turned to soup and I could barely even see enough to drive at five or ten miles an hour. It could be quite a while before I found the next exit. I finally turned on the radio and flipped through the stations. They were all saying the same thing: “Find shelter! Find shelter! Tornados! Tornados!”

Five, in fact.

A weatherman was listing off all the places the tornadoes were touching down. I pulled over into a ditch and grabbed my atlas and tried to figure out where I was. There! My finger landed on a spot on the interstate. I looked at the surrounding towns and realized I was directly in the middle of all five tornadoes.

Gulp.

I did not know what to do. Sit there and wait on the side of the road? That’s terrifying. Keep driving? That’s also terrifying.

At the end of the day, it just feels like moving is less scary than not moving, because at least you’re doing something. So I started driving.

The rain was attacking the car. Wind was beating me from every side. My wipers were on high and not really doing anything. I had turned off my music and the radio. I couldn’t hear them anyway. The noise from outside was deafening. And then all of a sudden…

- fwoosh -

silence

There I was. A tiny car on a long stretch of interstate curving gently to the left. I could see it all so clearly. Everything was eerily quiet. To my right and up ahead was a wall of storm. Up above, too.

Then I looked to my left.

There it was.

A giant tornado.

Usually when you hear of a tornado they are moving quickly, like they have somewhere to go. This enormous funnel cloud seemed to just stand there in the sky, like a monolith from another dimension.

The only way I have ever thought to describe it is that the tornado had sucked all the storm up into itself so that the area right around it was calm and clear, almost in the shape of a donut. The tornado was the hole, and I was driving in the actual donut itself.

That was my first instinct, and I have always felt like an ant in a donut every time I’ve thought about this moment over the past 25 or so years.

But truly, here was the greater instinct I felt:

Total and complete awe.

I would have thought I would have been afraid. I know somewhere in my body and mind I was, but in that moment I didn’t feel fear. I know I felt overwhelmed. By power, maybe? Majesty, even? Grandeur?? No, I think “Awe” is the word.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” the Bible says. That scripture always bothered me as a kid.

We’re not supposed to be afraid of God, right? He’s our friend; he loves us. We’re supposed to love him. We’re not supposed to be afraid of him.

But when the storm stopped and suddenly I was in the presence of a power so much greater than I could ever have imagined, I began to understand just a tiny bit the fear of the Lord.

I could finally imagine Moses on Mount Sinai, looking at the back of God’s robe.

Psalm 29

A psalm of David.

Ascribe to the Lord, you heavenly beings,
    ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.
Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name;
    worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness.

The voice of the Lord is over the waters;
    the God of glory thunders,
    the Lord thunders over the mighty waters.
The voice of the Lord is powerful;
    the voice of the Lord is majestic.
The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars;
    the Lord breaks in pieces the cedars of Lebanon.
He makes Lebanon leap like a calf,
    Sirion like a young wild ox.
The voice of the Lord strikes
    with flashes of lightning.
The voice of the Lord shakes the desert;
    the Lord shakes the Desert of Kadesh.
The voice of the Lord twists the oaks
    and strips the forests bare.
And in his temple all cry, “Glory!”

The Lord sits enthroned over the flood;
    the Lord is enthroned as King forever.
The Lord gives strength to his people;
    the Lord blesses his people with peace.

We’ve been reading in Exodus about Moses recently. After he hangs out with Yahweh, he walks back down to the rest of the Israelites and his face is actually glowing. Dude had a literal mountaintop experience. Talk about a camp high.

To experience just a fraction of the power of God and to walk away not destroyed, but with a blessing.

This is how I felt as a young man on the interstate in southern Illinois who suddenly found himself driving through the inside of a donut.

One of the craziest things about this experience is that I was totally and completely alone. I had no iPhone, no camera, no one else in the car with me. I can’t prove to you that this happened.

And yet I know that is part of what makes this one of my most cherished memories. Since the moment I drove back into the storm, and the terror and panic of what I’d just witnessed came rushing in, I recognized it was a holy moment.

Surely that tornado was a lot of things for a lot of people. To many of them, not great things. My dear friend Eric and his family lost their home in a tornado and barely escaped with their lives. I’ve seen firsthand how devastating a storm like this can be.

In the middle of southern Illinois, at the very least, that funnel cloud surely ruined a few farmers’ harvests. Most likely a great deal more.

Isn’t that also the way the Lord works? “He gives and takes away.” Somebody lost their livelihood. I got this sacred moment. All from the same storm.

Is it fair? Not at all.

Will we ever understand it? Probably not.

What are we supposed to do with that? I don’t know.

Yet what I learned that day has continued to grow more true with each passing year and each battering storm, even when (especially when) I wasn’t the lucky one with his face all a-glow.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

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