It is easy to read of disasters far away and feel some semblance of sympathy for those going through them. Somehow it doesn’t touch us as deeply as it should. We pray for those involved and then move on with our daily lives. It is not the same when someone you love is involved in that disaster. My daughter and her husband live in Florida on the St. John River, about 35 miles from St. Augustine. They are inland, not on the coast, but with this monster storm, it didn’t matter. They had a beautiful frontage about 60 yards from the river. Their boat dock led to a pontoon boat suspended in a shelter. When hurricane Matthew struck, the docks along the river were torn apart and part of my daughter’s dock was up against the house in two feet of water. The pontoon boat was barely tethered to a remaining piling. The storm surge obliterated the dock, and their yard, while the wind tore four big trees up by the roots and slammed them down on the ground like twigs. I thank God that none of the trees fell on their house and the water stopped at the edge of their screened porch within 2 inches of coming in the house. When the trees began to fall, they waded through 2 feet of water to get out and stayed with a neighbor on higher ground who had a generator. My daughter powered her cell phone with her computer. Seeing videos of the storm outside their house, the howling of the wind and the crack of the trees, filmed just before they left, sent me to prayer. How helpless you feel when you are 3,000 miles away and cannot help. They wept, survived, recovered, and face a mountain of restoration, but the storm has passed. I won’t read an account of flooding or a storm again without the realization and reality of what the families are going through.