Why We Moved

We love the baby Jesus because he saved our church when the storm came and made the walls move back and forth like they were made of tall sheets of paper. We love our baby Jesus because when the water came into the church and the men were screaming “Flood! Flood!” and the water was higher than the altar and the water was almost as high as three men—we love our baby Jesus because he did not let our church float away.

Some people who lived next to the church and were standing on their roofs when the bathtub turned into the Colorado river lost their homes and they had long bones in their cheeks and they looked scared. Some of the people who were neighbors became dead. Some of them floated past the church, but they floated fast because the river was fast because the weather man said it was a storm surge and the storm surge was directly in our town. Some of the other people who lived close to the church and had homes that had crosses on the front and who were people who came into the church even if it was in the summer and it was really nice outside—those people did not lose their houses or if they did they did not become dead and float past us when we were huddled together.

When we were huddled together, we prayed to the baby Jesus because the baby Jesus was born and he was small and he was there to help the man and the woman to become people who are in heaven when they become dead. I prayed harder than the other people because I needed to let the baby Jesus know that I was serious about praying. One of the other kids that was praying did not pray that hard, he kept pointing, he kept saying: “Look, there goes the Gorrings’ house!” or “Is that a body?” He was not busy praying. He did not find his parents after the storm because they had become dead because he had not been praying hard enough to the baby Jesus.

The baby Jesus must really not like my friends or my parents friends because after the storm we returned to our neighborhood and all the houses were gone or were torn into two pieces and the people looked sad. We must live in the wrong neighborhood, I told my father and he looked at me and he did not speak because his eyes were round and red and I think he was crying. I would have been crying too because we were loved by baby Jesus so much that our home was ok and it was not too badly destroyed (even though we did need the men with the white smocks to put a blue cover on our roof).

I wanted to tell my father that I was happy too, that I knew that we were alive because the baby Jesus knew that we had really prayed, that we had prayed really hard. But I did not tell him. He already knew. My father already knew. He held my hand all week and he squeezed it when me and my mother and him got into a car and drove to another neighborhood.


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