Sunday started off just like any other day in the rental house we were temporarily staying in on Pennsylvania Street in Van.

It was Mother’s Day and I always said to my wife, Carrie, that I wanted to give her a day that she wouldn’t forget.

By early evening, it had started raining and I knew there was a tornado watch in place for the region until late evening.

We don’t have local television so we couldn’t see any weather reports regarding what was about to happen.

At 9 p.m., our two daughters went to bed and a few minutes later, the lights in the house started flickering and the power went off.

My wife and I quickly got out candles and flashlights to provide some light in the house.

Seconds later Carrie heard a very faint sound, which sounded a bit like the tornado sirens.

It was unusually quiet though — probably due to the different air pressure outside because of the incoming storm system — and I didn’t actually hear it.

We put our heads up to the glass to listen again and we could hear it very faintly. “We need to get into the interior bathroom,” Carrie said.

“It is just a warning and we aren’t under a tornado warning, so we should be OK for now,” I told her.

At this point I was standing in the kitchen and heard a rumbling sound outside from the wind. It was a noise level I had never heard before.

We quickly got the girls out of bed, rushed into the cramped bathroom with a flashlight and within 20 seconds we took a direct hit from the tornado.

In the bathroom, all four of us were praying aloud for God’s protection over us, over and over again as the tornado passed right over us.

We heard clashes, glass breaking, the house shook and we literally thought “our time on this earth as a family is over.”

Within 60 seconds of the tornado hitting us, it was done and gone. A deathly silence engulfed us as we came out from the bathroom, not knowing if the house was still standing around us. The house survived, but had significant damage.

Where I had stood moments earlier in the kitchen, a large piece of lumber had pierced the roof coming inside the kitchen and lounge like a javelin.

If I hadn’t moved, it would have taken me. Windows had shattered onto the girls’ beds where they had been lying moments before.

We were alive.

We looked outside to see complete devastation. It looked like a war zone. People started coming down the street asking if everyone was OK.

We collected a few things along with our pets that were unharmed and headed to the cars to find that most of the windows had been blown out on both of them.

We got inside anyway and drove toward the Mercy Ships campus, about seven miles away.

We heard reports of another tornado heading our way and weren’t sure we would even make it to Mercy Ships safely.

A few minutes later, however, we rolled into the Mercy Ships parking lot where friends met us and provided us with a bed for the night.

Looking back, we were so incredibly fortunate to have survived the tornado. Many of our neighbors’ homes were destroyed.

The following morning, we were stunned by the army of volunteers who came to the city to help us move out of our home and retrieve our belongings, which we placed in storage.

We relocated to a small apartment on the Mercy Ships campus and will stay there until our new home, which is under construction and was undamaged, is finished in Lindale.

Our builder has committed to finishing our home in record time so we can move in and get settled again as a family.

 

Russ Holmes is director of development/corporate relations at Mercy Ships, an international nonprofit that provides free medical care to people in developing countries. In 2007, Russ, his wife, Carrie, and their two children, Rachel and Katie, moved from the United Kingdom to Van to work with Mercy Ships.