The House Built for the Big One

In October 2018, Hurricane Michael flattened Mexico Beach, Florida. Homes were flooded, roofs torn off, debris everywhere. Yet one house, the Sand Palace, stood high on its pilings above the wreckage. Its owners, Lebron Lackey and his uncle Russell King, said that was no accident. Florida code required homes to handle 120 mph winds, but they built for about 240 to 250 mph: poured concrete walls on 40-foot pilings, rebar all through, steel cables running from the girders over the roof. They gave up a balcony, shrank the overhang, and swapped some windows for concrete, even though friends criticized them for it. It cost them 15 to 20 percent more. When Lackey came home and saw his neighbors’ losses, he had tears in his eyes for his community. Jesus told us about two houses and one storm. The storm comes for everybody. The foundation decides what’s left standing.

The Seeds Came Back Out of the Ice

In Norway sits the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a safe place to store backup copies of the world’s crop seeds. A research center called ICARDA kept a seed bank in Aleppo, Syria, with about 150,000 cereal, food, and feed samples from more than 100 countries. From 2008 to 2014, they deposited duplicate copies in the vault. Then civil war forced them out of Aleppo. In September 2015, for the first time ever, seeds were withdrawn from the vault: 38,073 samples in 128 boxes, shipped to Lebanon and Morocco. They were sown that November. By 2016 they had harvested fresh seed, and in 2017 more than 20,000 samples went right back into the vault. Somebody saved seed in good times so there’d be bread in hard times. That’s what faithful sowing looks like. You plant for a harvest you may need later, and the harvest gives you seed to plant again.