“Like a mighty wind”

Sunday 9th September 2020

Storm Ciara. It sounds so friendly giving comfortable names to bad weather. It does not work, it is not friendly.

After having been awake during the night due to a combination of arthritic pain and the sound, I awoke a second time at 8am to the radio alarm. The news, and the rattling of windows, was not good. News from the Calder Valley was that water was starting to flow down the streets at Hebden Bridge and the unfinished flood defences at Mytholmroyd were looked likely to be overwhelmed. Despite our prayers, these places were flooded later in the day, only a little over four years since the last floods on Boxing Day 2015.

Elland Bridge, also destroyed in 2015 and rebuilt was also closed by a shipping container washed downstream and jammed under the arches. The nearby Collier’s Arms pub had water halfway up its windows. I saw the video posted later in the day.

This is usually a blog about church and what happened there. I would love to say that the sound of a rushing mighty wind was the sound of the Holy Spirit landing on Holy Trinity Church, Huddersfield, but I do not know. The force of the rushing mighty wind was too great for me to get there. We started out, but only got a few yards before it was clear that walking with the aid of crutches was at best dangerous. We turned back. I have never felt more disabled.

At the time of writing the sermon from Holy Trinity had not yet been published. https://www.holytrinityhuddersfield.com/recent-sermons/

Storms are destructive. People in the next valley from here have yet again had their lives devastated with high winds and floodwater. The local politician who said there was a danger of Mytholmroyd becoming a ghost town was exaggerating, many of the houses there are up the steep sides of the valley, but the heart of these communities is likely to go. Washed away on the more and more frequent storms and floods.

This is global warming. On a planet whose surface is two-thirds water, warmer temperatures mean more water vapour evaporates into the atmosphere leading to more rain, more storms. We need to act now and start protecting the planet God put into our care, for the sake of our communities.