Day 21

Yesterday was a rough day. My emotions seemed to be raw and overwhelming, bubbling to the surface throughout the day.

Jon and I were up early and headed over to the house to pick up paint chips. I had plans of trying to pick up some paint at Home Depot. We stopped by Doug and Betty’s house on the way out. They live closer to the hardest hit area of Diamondhead and had water up to their ceilings. They are currently living in an RV parked in their driveway and have their salvageable things stacked up under an awning and the water damaged items stacked up, like everyone else, along side the street. We visited for a while and Betty shared with me some of their stories. She lost so many things but was delighted to find that, although her china cabinet was on the floor, all of her china was intact. She had her guest room decorated with hundreds of Beanie Babies, all of which were soaked in the flood waters. When Jon was walking through their house, he even found two of them up on the drooping ceiling fans.

From there we drove to Biloxi to drop off Daniel’s trumpet at the music store to be fixed. We found it in the trunk of Heather’s car, floating in flood waters. Thankfully, trumpets are pretty durable and can be cleaned and repaired. We’ll have to buy him a new case, though; the other is in the trash heap.

We stopped at Sam’s but it was a mad house so we went on to Home Depot, which was also a mad house. We tried looking at appliances, to replace the ones ruined by water, but all of their appliances were boxed up. I’m sure everyone else along the coast that still has a house standing is trying to purchase replacements for their homes. We looked at floor tile and found that Home Depot charges quite a bit for laying the tile. I told Jon, we can save a lot of money by laying it ourselves. I wanted to also look at paint, but Jon wasn’t that interested. He’s still focused on all the work we have yet to do in get insulation and walls back up.

We went over to the house to work for the afternoon. I told Jon and Bob they should try to get the DirectTV working. After all, we’re paying for that along with NFL Sunday ticket and they haven’t been able to watch it all month. So, Jon climbed up on the roof to adjust the dish, while I watched our 32 inch TV to let him know when the signal starting coming in. I couldn’t have been watching the TV more than five seconds when, POW! The TV blew. Needless to say, I didn’t handle the situation very well. It just didn’t seem fair.

Jon and I took an evening walk to talk. We discovered that we each have different ideas of how to hope for the near future. Neither is wrong, they’re just different. We just have to allow each other the liberty of having different hopes. We also need to keep praying together.

Today, Jon and Bob drove to Beaumont Texas to pick up the kids. They should be arriving here soon. I’m not sure whether or not the kids will want to go over and look at the house this evening. The Tyo house will be full tonight.

Tomorrow I return to work.

Please continue to pray for all of us. Our spirits grow weary and need refreshing.

God bless

Grace & Peace