The Prayer of a Young Boy

Texas was hit with a bad storm this week. Very frigid temps and then the power grid failed. Politics aside, it's a disaster. We've been fortunate so far. We lost power for about 20 hours. And we have a boil water notice. That means we can't drink the tap water or do much with it. Basically flush toilets. But then the water pressure bottomed out for all of Houston so we had no water. It was/is a mess.

Thankfully, our prophet and Church leaders have encouraged us to be prepared. We prepare for hurricanes and we've learned this is pretty much a hurricane except no wind damage and no 100 degree weather. We also couldn't really leave if we wanted to because roads were icy everywhere.

We have plenty of water storage. We have a gas fireplace. We have batteries, flashlights, camping lanterns, propane grill, etc. It was nice to feel validation in our preparations.

We had two families stay with us the first night of the ordeal. One family is still here. We expect power to still go on and off over the next several days. Hopefully shorter increments. And it will be cold the next couple days but nothing like Sunday-Tuesday. We've had so many blessings through it all it is almost too long to list. But I don't want to forget:

- I'm glad I stopped pumping Lydia a few weeks ago and weaned her from breastmilk. Trying to keep all that refrigerated and finding time to pump with the chaos would have been challenging.

- I'm glad we have a slew of kid activities that I save for "rainy days." It's been a great few days with the kids to do some fun things.

- I'm grateful for good neighbors. This morning, our neighbors across the street knocked on our door asking if we needed anything. We needed some pool water to flush our toilets. That way, we didn't have to use our precious drinking water. The husband helped fill up a big bucket and carry it over to the house.

- that the power went out after the kids went to bed. The first 10 hours of no power were during the night. Not such a bad time.

- I'm glad we listen and prepare for natural disasters. It's been nice to focus on serving others rather than being worried about our own livlihood. 

Tanner reminded me tonight of the purity of a child's prayer. He said our dinner prayer and so plainly asked Heavenly Father to give us power again. I started crying. To hear my son ask and more importantly, to know God would hear his prayer meant so much. The power came back about an hour later and Tanner was thrilled. It was better than Christmas morning.