I stood by the night-darkened window, watching rain drops gather and trickle down the screen. I sadly asked my husband, “Why does it always seem to rain when a person has something nice planned?”

Arnie irritably responded, “You can’t change anything by watching it rain. Get back into bed and forget about it.”

A flash of lightning and a roll of thunder accompanied my return to bed. Needing to unwind before going to sleep, I pointed out, “This rain is coming too soon after we almost got trapped in Canada by gully-washing rainstorms. It’s hard to believe that we got home from that experience just one week ago!” A gentle snore made me realize Arnie wasn’t listening.

I usually love lying in bed at night and listening to a summer thunderstorm passing through the countryside. Watching the flashes of lightning and listening to the gentle rolling thunder and pattering rain on the windowpanes make me feel cozy. But tonight, it just made me feel uneasy.

The event that I was worried the rain would ruin wasn’t just a simple occasion that could be postponed to another week. This weekend the church Arnie and I attended was celebrating 125 years since its formation. A picnic with lots of food for all the parishioners was planned. Someone had arranged games in the park across from the church for the children to play. The parish was celebrating our patron saint’s name day in conjunction with the quasquicentennial anniversary. In preparation, the church building was given a much-needed restoration leading up to the occasion. In addition, I was excited about the debut of the parish history book that I’d worked on for the past year. I looked forward to seeing it in print!

A particularly loud lighting strike startled me awake from a sound sleep. I was on my feet next to the bed before the accompanying thunder finished crashing overhead. Having picked up its intensity, the storm was dumping buckets of rain over the countryside. Through the waterlogged early morning light, I could see the Little Eau Pleine River from my bedroom window. It was swollen and overflowing its banks. Much of the water was roaring down stream as fast as possible, but some of it backed up and flooded the lower surrounding fields.

Lightning flashed and thunder crashed in quick succession. Standing next to me, Arnie commented, “The worse of the storm is directly overhead right now. The lightning strikes are close to us.”

Immediately after I pointed out, “We still have electricity, though.” A blinding bolt of lightning flashed across the sky and a ground rattling clap of thunder followed my claim. Glancing at the blank bedside clock, I announced with disgust, “And, now we don’t have electricity.”

Picking up the bedside phone, Arnie added, “We don’t have a working phone, either.”

After its final tantrum overhead, the violent storm moved away. A gentle rain continued to fall for most of the morning. I went outside to see if I could find what the lighting had hit to make our electricity and phone go out. It wasn’t hard to figure out. A young, white pine tree, 15 to 20 feet tall, standing on a small hill behind our home was fried to a crisp. Burn marks on the grass surrounding the tree showed how electricity from the strike had traveled down the trunk to the tip of each root.

Many of my neighbors were out and about, too. I learned from them that the storm had washed out most of our township’s culverts. One neighbor who lived across the river from me in a basement apartment, was awakened by a sudden flood of water as it crashed through sliding glass doors. She escaped through an egress window high above her bed and was lucky enough to snag clothing for the day as it floated past.

I will never forget the month of June in 2002 when I experienced two, once-in-a-lifetime storms. One happened in Canada when I was on vacation and the other, right after we returned to Wisconsin. The celebration at our church took place as planned despite the storm. Mostly indoors, though. As the church’s 125 years of existence shows, life goes on no matter what happens.