Earthquake! Part 2

Tomorrow is the fiftieth anniversary of the Good Friday Alaska Earthquake of March 27, 1964, with its epicenter in Prince William Sound. The hardest hit area stretched along the coast of the Gulf of Alaska from Kodiak to Valdez, including Anchorage and the Kenai Peninsula. My family lived in Seward at that time. Last week, in memory of that devastating earthquake which forever changed Alaska as well as my own life, I began blogging excerpts about their experiences from my book, Frontiers of Faith.*

Last week, we left my family in a line of cars trying to escape from the burning town. They could see a tsunami racing toward their car. My mother said the crest of the wave looked as though a giant hand was shoving boats, houses, railroad cars, and burning oil up and over the railroad tracks that ran parallel to the lagoon road, the only way out of town.

Then the line of traffic stopped!

No traffic was coming from the opposite direction, so my dad quickly pulled out into that lane to pass the line of stopped automobiles. Just as their car reached a little knoll at the far side of the lagoon, the tsunami roared in behind them smashing all those houses, boats, railroad cars, and other debris against the cliffs. The water swirled around the car's tires, but they were high enough to avoid the brunt of the wave.

Horrified, they glimpsed several cars behind them caught up in the wave, tumbled like toys, and swept toward the cliffs. Then, they noticed that the wave had carried the fiery debris far into the forest at the head of the bay, setting the trees on fire.

My dad had driven only a short ways when the high school principal flagged them down. "The bridges are out!" he hollered. "You're welcome to come to my house in Forest Acres."

A series of three bridges provided the only way out of the area set afire by the tsunami. The earthquake had caused the roadbeds to sink six to eight feet lower than the bridges. The evacuees were trapped in the burning forest. Then God intervened. A third tsunami extinguished the fire!

At the entrance to Forest Acres, a housing development on the outskirts of Seward, my parents met up with my grandparents. Darkness had descended on the stricken community, although fires and explosions lit the sky all night as the Texaco oil tanks, like erupting volcanoes, blew their tops.

The family spent the long, harrowing night with about forty other people in the home of the high school principal. They had no lights and no heat. Though the calendar said it was spring, the Alaskan night was wintry cold. My family was thankful to be together. Many spent that long night not knowing if other family members were alive. Some were stranded on rooftops.

About noon the next day, the weary survivors were allowed to return to their devastated city. Many found only piles of rubble or empty lots where their homes had once stood. The streets were full of shattered houses, smashed boats and cars, upended railroad cars, and railroad ties and piling from the docks stacked up like a giant game of Pickup Sticks. The huge oil storage tanks continued to explode for several days. Soot and ashes blackened the town. Numerous aftershocks further terrorized the residents.

When my grandparents returned to their home, they discovered their neighbor's house had been extensively damaged by the seismic sea waves. Debris dropped by the waves surrounded their own house within a couple of inches, but no water had entered their house even though theirs was slightly lower than the neighbors'. God had miraculously spared their home. Aside from the broken antique dishes, the only damage was to their chimney and the underpinnings of the floor, which was easily repaired. The church and parsonage also survived with minor damage, although several church families had lost their homes. For several weeks, however, everyone was without power, water, and sewer.

When the rubble was cleared away from the waterfront, nothing was left. Ninety-five percent of the industrial area had been destroyed. The canneries, the docks, the boat harbor, and the railroad yards had vanished. In addition, 84 homes in a town with a population of 1,800 had been reduced to rubble. Thirty lives had been lost.

Twelve bridges along the Seward Highway had collapsed. The land had sunk approximately eight feet, which allowed the tide to wash out huge sections of the railroad and the highway. Thus, the tourist trade was cut off, no ships could dock, and there was no place to process fish and shrimp. The economic devastation could not have been more complete. But hardy Alaskans vowed to rebuild. And they did.

I was away at college when the earthquake hit. I had spent the week with my roommate in Coos Bay, Oregon, which was also hit by a seismic wave generated by that earthquake. My parents thought I was there, but we had gone to Portland for the weekend. I wondered if I still had a family not realizing that they wondered if they still had their firstborn daughter.

To read how the Earthquake affected me for the rest of my life, read my five previous blogs dated March and April 2013, "In a Matter of Minutes, Parts 1-5."

*To order Frontiers of Faith, visit my website http://www.annaleeconti.com

Earthquake!

March 27, 2014, is the fiftieth anniversary of the Great Alaska Earthquake, also known as the Good Friday Earthquake, that registered 9.2 on the Richter Scale, a force equal to 12,000 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs, the most powerful earthquake to ever hit North America. It was bigger than any of the recent devastating earthquakes in Japan or Indonesia. At the time, my family lived in one of the hardest hit towns--Seward, 120 miles south of Anchorage. In memory of that event, I will share in this post and the next one excerpts from my book, Frontiers of Faith, about their experiences.

Good Friday, March 27, 1964, dawned sunny with a promise of spring. About 5:30 p.m., my mother and brother dropped by my grandparents' to borrow a lace collar she wanted to wear for the combined church choirs' performance of DuBois' The Seven Last Words that evening. Entering the glass-enclosed front porch, Mother complimented Grandma on the beautiful plants blooming there. After visiting for a few minutes, Grandma went to get the collar.

At that moment, the house began to shake. Thinking Grandpa was wrestling with his grandson, Grandma stumbled out of the bedroom, calling, "What are you doing?"

The tall, heavy antique dresser she had been looking in crashed to the floor, slamming the bedroom door shut behind her. If she had still been in front of it, she would have been crushed. Straight ahead in the kitchen, she could only watch as the china closet doors swung open. The fragile antique dishes she had inherited from her mother, many of them over 200 years old, flew out and shattered on the kitchen floor. Helpless to do a thing, she clung to the door frame, which was shaking so violently she was sure it too would collapse and bring the roof down on top of them all.

Mother clutched the door frame to the front porch, helplessly watching her mother's beautiful plants topple to the floor one on top of the other.

The shaking went on and on. After five minutes that seemed like an eternity, the violent quaking began to subside. Grandpa and Mother hurried to the kitchen to find Grandma, shocked and bewildered, standing ankle deep in broken dishes and groceries. Turning to my mother, Grandpa said, "I wonder what your house looks like!"

She and my brother staggered out the door onto the still heaving ground to their car. They were just getting in when Mother glanced up and saw a wall of flames about 100 feet high sweeping down the waterfront toward the Texaco oil storage tanks, which were less than two blocks from my grandparents' home.

Mother ran back in, yelling, "Get out of town fast! Those tanks are going to blow!"

My grandparents grabbed a few things and ran to their car. Picking up several panicky children whose parents were not home, they drove out of town, carefully navigating around deep cracks that crisscrossed the road as well as burning debris.

They learned later that when the earthquake hit, the bottom of Resurrection Bay on which Seward is situated opened up and then closed with such force that it catapulted raging waves into the town. The entire waterfront had disappeared into the bay. The huge Standard Oil storage tanks ruptured and belched burning oil and black smoke hundreds of feet into the air. The burning oil raced down the railroad tracks leaving a blazing inferno behind.

Within minutes the first tsunami rushed up the bay, regurgitating what it had swallowed. The force was so great that it hurled huge railroad cars and engines like sticks, snapped trees like toothpicks, and carried boats and homes several miles before smashing them against the cliffs.

Meanwhile, Mother and my brother drove across town to our church with its parsonage attached to pick up my dad and sister. The floors of the house were littered with debris, but no one was there. Daddy had run down the street to help a neighbor. Seeing the car, he dashed back. Praying that the Lord would protect their house, they picked up my sister and headed out of town away from the fires.

The only way out of town was a two-lane road across the lagoon, bordered by the railroad tracks on one side and cliffs on the other. They had driven about two-thirds of the way across the debris-strewn road when the line of cars slowed. Glancing out the right side window, Mother noticed fishing boats, flaming timbers, burning oil, and other debris being pushed up and over the railroad tracks, as though by a giant hand.

"Hurry!" she screamed. "A tsunami is coming!"

Just then, the line of traffic stopped.

To be continued.

God Will Do It Again!

Grandma Personeus was a storyteller. As newly weds in 1917, she and Grandpa went to the Territory of Alaska as pioneer missionaries with no promise of financial support. She enriched my childhood with her wonderful stories, keeping everyone spellbound with her vivid descriptions of their early days in Alaska living by faith and the miracles God performed on their behalf.

In 1974, while my husband was preparing for the ministry and I was working on the editorial staff at the Assemblies of God Headquarters in Springfield, Missouri, my grandparents, Charles and Florence Personeus, visited us for several weeks. The first Assemblies of God missionaries to Alaska, they were still ministering there during their retirement years.

Before they returned home, Grandma placed in my hands a packet of her written accounts of their many miraculous healings, adventures, and God's provision. "People want me to write a book of my stories," she said, "but I'm too old to see it through by myself. I'm giving you this material to do with as you think best."

Then she explained that she and Grandpa had chosen a particular verse of Scripture for their senior years: "Once I was young, and now I am old, yet I have never seen the godly forsaken, nor seen their children begging bread" (Psalm 37:25, NLT). Wherever they traveled across Alaska and the Lower Forty-eight States after retiring from full-time pastoring, they spread that message.

When I read her stories, I was struck by not only the stories but the truths they contained. As a working mother, though, I had no time then to write a book, but I began to collect additional stories and do the necessary research. Eight years later, I was able to set aside a week to hole up and write the manuscript. Before my grandparents died in 1985 and 1986, I was able to read that first draft aloud to them.

After many attempts, I was finally able to get Frontiers of Faith* published in 2002, sixteen years after both of my grandparents had gone to heaven. My purpose in writing the book, as was theirs, was to "write down for the coming generation what the Lord has done, so that people not yet born will praise him" (Psalm 102:18, TEV).

Everyone has a testimony--a story of what God has done in your life. You may not be able to write a book, but today there are many ways to record your story for your children and grandchildren: storytelling, handwritten or computer journaling, letters, scrapbooking, camcorders, CDs, DVDs, YouTube, Facebook, blogging, to name a few. What a blessing it has been to me and my family, as well as to other who have read my book, to hear of the ways God performed miracles for my grandparents to provide for their needs. Now I am blogging our stories of what God has done for us.

I encourage you to write or record your own accounts. Your experiences can encourage your loved ones in their times of need because "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever" (Hebrews 13:8). What He's done for you, He'll do for them too. Hearing your experiences will give them confidence that God will see them through whatever life throws at them.

Some years ago, during a very difficult time in my life, I was encouraged by a song that said what God has done for me, "He'll Do It Again" for you. And He did. How are you sharing what the Lord has done in your life?

*Available at http://www.annaleeconti.com.

Quality Time

When our son was born, I had a strong desire to be a stay-at-home mom at least until he began school. All that changed when Bob resigned his regular Army commission to prepare for the ministry. I had to work.

Our son, Bobby, had just passed his second birthday when we arrived in Springfield, Missouri, that January of 1973. The only nursery school with an opening was in a church between our house and Bob's campus. It sounded ideal--until I dropped him off that first morning on my way to work.

We had moved across the country twice in the previous four months. He was newly potty-trained and had spent no time away from me. When he realized I was leaving him in a strange place with people he didn't know, he lay on the floor and sobbed his little heart out. That sight and sound still tears at me, even though I had no choice but to leave.

The nursery school was staffed primarily by college students. The place was attractive and clean, and the teachers were sweet and caring, but we soon discovered that due to their class schedules, our son was met by a different stranger each morning. To top things off, the toilets in the nursery school were standard size such as those found in public restrooms. They were huge, and they roared with a  huge vroom when flushed. An already scared little boy, newly potty-trained, must have thought they'd swallow him up, and he began having accidents.

Before long, he began having asthma attacks, which he'd never had previously. Desperately, we prayed for a solution. That's when Bob met a fellow married student in one of his classes who had a son Bobby's age. His wife was looking for a little boy to babysit who would be a playmate for their son. She was a God-send! Bobby loved her.

Rosie cared for Bobby in her home until he turned three. By then, he was mature enough to thrive in another church nursery school staffed by loving grandmothers who met him every day. He remained in that nursery school until he graduated from their kindergarten and we moved to our first pastorate, where once again I became a stay-at-home mom. I wrote stories and curriculum and taught Bible studies while he was in school or asleep in bed, but I was there for him when he came home from school.

When God called us to the ministry, He also provided care for our child. I was worried that Bobby would suffer from not having me home, but he actually thrived once God led us to the right caregivers. During those years as a student, my husband would often pick up Bobby from nursery school to spend quality time with him before picking me up from work and going to his evening job. My time with my son after work until he went to bed was special. Saturdays, we did fun things as a family.

Because our time together was limited, we made it count. We discovered that the quality of the time spent together was more important than mere quantity.

Coincidence...or God?

In his first semester at Central Bible College in Springfield, Missouri, my husband, Bob, began driving school bus, first as a substitute driver, but within two weeks he had his own route. One spring morning, he picked up the last of his fifty junior high students and was driving fifty miles an hour up Route M in the Ozarks just south of Springfield, Missouri, when suddenly his right front wheel went rolling down the highway ahead of the bus!

"That's when the Lord took over as driver," Bob said.

All he could do was hang on to the steering wheel and pray as the disabled bus careened down the road into the ditch, missing a culvert pipe by a fraction of an inch. If the axle had connected with that culvert pipe, the bus would have flipped.

It had rained for a day or two before the accident, softening the earth in the ditch.The driveway over the culvert funneled the bus squarely into the soft ditch, slowing the bus, keeping it upright, and preventing the gas tanks from catching fire. The front wheel wells inverted as the dirt pushed up into the undercarriage. Bob saw that and was sure his legs would be broken, but the bus came to a stop just in time.

If you've ever ridden a bus full of junior high students, you know they are a noisy bunch. That morning, during the accident those students didn't make a sound. You could hear the proverbial pin drop. Bob quickly instructed several larger boys to open the back door and help all the students jump out. The bus was totaled, but no one was hurt.

The investigation revealed that when the bus had been serviced, the cotter pin that keeps the large nut in place that holds the wheel on had not been put back on. The wheel had gradually worked its way over until it came off.

A member of the school board and a reporter for the Springfield newspaper were driving behind the bus and saw the entire accident. Bob was commended for safely wrecking a school bus!

Later, Bob drove me along his bus route to show me where it had happened. The accident occurred on the only straight-of-way on the entire route. The rest of the way was full of hairpin curves, drop offs to rivers below, bridges on curves. If that wheel had come off at any other spot on that road, there would have been a terrible tragedy.

Coincidence, you say? I believe God was watching over my husband and that bus load of kids.  The Lord "redeems me from death" (Psalm 103:4, NLT).

Stepping Stones

Today, let me encourage those who are seeking employment in this difficult job market.

I've written previously about how my husband, Bob, a career officer in the Army, resigned his regular commission after six years of active duty to answer God's call to full-time ministry. In January 1973, we moved from Arizona to Springfield, Missouri, where he enrolled for the spring semester at Central Bible College to prepare for the ministry.

The G.I. Bill would cover his tuition, but I would need to work full time to cover our rent and other living expenses. We had enough savings to see us through until March 1, but I had to find a job by then. After getting settled in our rental house, I began the wearying task of job hunting, praying that God would lead me to the job He had for me.

Because Springfield is a six college town, February is the most difficult time of year to find a job there. With an abundance of workers, all available positions had already been filled. I have a degree in elementary education and music, but school districts don't hire mid-term.

So, I checked out the Classified section of the newspaper and the employment office and went on a couple of interviews but was declared "overqualified." I asked my Sunday school class to pray that I'd find a job. One lady in the class told me that the Trailmobile dealership where she worked was looking for an accounts payable bookkeeper. In high school I had taken bookkeeping, so I applied and was hired on (you guessed it) March 1! The Lord is never too late, but sometimes to stretch our faith, He waits until the last minute!

Six months later, I was given two weeks notice that I was being laid off. I shed a few tears then prayed. Once again, God's timing was perfect. By the end of the first week, I was hired as a copywriter for the Advertising Department at the Assemblies of God Headquarters--with an increase in pay!

While I had good writing skills, after the trial three months, it was decided that copy writing for advertising was not my style. More tears. What would I do now? At the last moment, I was given a temporary secretarial job in the Youth Department. When that ended, the position of editorial assistant for the three youth magazines, Youth Alive, Hisway, and CAM opened up unexpectedly. I was in the right place at the right time, and again, my pay increased. The editors encouraged me to submit my own short stories and articles on a freelance basis, and several of them were published in the youth magazines as well as other in house magazines, including The Pentecostal Evangel.

Two years later, I felt the Lord leading me to transfer to the Church School Literature Department, where I wrote and edited Vacation Bible School materials. Before long, I was also writing Sunday School and Children's Church curriculum on assignment. After my husband completed seminary and we moved to Upstate New York to plant a new church, I continued writing curriculum on assignment for Gospel Publishing House for the next 25 years.Not only did my husband get his ministry degrees, but God led me into a lifelong ministry of writing that now includes two published books and another one on the way.

An old hymn says, "God leads His dear children along." That has certainly been my experience. The job changes were difficult and required stepping out in faith, but when one door closed, God opened another. The setbacks were really God's stepping stones.

How has God led you?

Careening into Blackness

What do you do when a Pontiac GTO going 60 miles per hour suddenly plows into the back of your stopped Volkswagen square back, sending you careening into blackness?

My husband was in Vietnam in 1969. It was the end of the Labor Day weekend, and I was driving back to my home in Anchorage, Alaska, after visiting my folks in Valdez. A friend rode along on the six-hour drive each way. It was dark when, nine miles from home, I rounded a bend in the two-lane highway to find two moose skittering down the frosty road.

No one wants a ton of moose landing on their hood, let alone two of them, especially when the engine is in the rear of a Volkswagen. Since no one was immediately behind me, I stopped. The moose wandered to the side of the road as I downshifted to go on. At that moment, two cars appeared around the bend and passed me. I honked my horn to warn them. Then, WHAM!

A blinding jolt! I screamed, "Oh, Jesus, help us!" I blacked out momentarily then hung on for the ride of my life. Scared I would hit a tree, I pushed my foot on the brake as hard as I could, laying down 32 feet of rubber on the roadway before veering off and rolling over and over as though in slow motion. It seemed to take forever before my car finally came to rest on its right side.

The windshield had popped out. I was hanging in the seat belt above my passenger, my head lolling from side to side. Was my neck was broken?

Almost immediately, people appeared. I didn't want them to move me, but they convinced me it was necessary. They laid us gently on the cold ground. All I could think about was my husband, who was in a war zone, thinking I was safe at home. What if I was paralyzed? What if I died?

An ambulance soon arrived. Without stabilizing my neck, the attendants picked me up to put me on the stretcher. In the darkness, one of them stepped on my long hair, yanking my head back. Certain they would paralyze me, I screamed for them to stop. They laid me back down, and I reached up to smooth my hair under my head so they could pick me up.

Thank God, X-rays showed my neck was not broken. The force of the impact broke the back of my seat, which fell flat just as the engine cover flew up and hit me across the bony point at the base of my skull. If it had hit any lower, it would have taken my head off. Instead, it gave me a five-inch gash, which bled profusely and required eight stitches, and a severe whiplash. Later medical technology revealed two herniated disks that I still suffer the effects of, but I'm alive and I'm not paralyzed.

Amazingly, no one else was seriously hurt. My passenger had a cracked rib from the seat belt. The driver of the GTO was uninjured, although his car was totaled too. He had had a few beers and was following too closely to the cars in front of him so he didn't realize I was stopped.

Isn't it amazing that the God by whom all things were created and are held together hears our cry in the time of trouble and is there to help us? When danger smacks you in the face (or back!), do you cry out to God? I know firsthand that He is "a very present help in trouble" (Psalm 46:1). How about you?