Hurricane effect: Worshiping through the storm
Most churches in the New York area closed down as Hurricane Irene approached. This made sense. We were in what the news reports called the "cone of uncertainty," so there was no way to know what the hurricane might bring on Sunday morning. The mayor ordered the shutdown of all New York City subway lines and buses. In many cases, the clergy themselves had no good way to get to church and wouldn't want to encourage their congregants to come out in unsafe conditions.
My circumstance was a bit different. I don't have to go outside to get to church; I just go down the stairs next to our kitchen. Besides, we have a shelter in our church for LGBTQ youth who are homeless. They had ridden out the storm inside, watching movies, listening to music and dancing in the church undercroft. Since several of them regularly attend worship, why cancel it?
Sunday morning dawned, and I was glad to see that the undercroft had not flooded as it had a few weeks earlier during a heavy rain. The repair job held up. There was a mouse in the kitchen sink, but nothing else out of the ordinary. Things had not gone so well for a Saturday night shelter volunteer who drove down from New Haven, then received a call telling him that a tree had crashed through his apartment wall. He couldn't drive back because the highways were closed, so he prepared a delicious cake for after church.
