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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, I am going to try and make today’s episode short and sweet so you don’t have to listen to my head cold stricken voice, and I believe if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a lesson I learned over the weekend by watching my daughter clean out our storm cellar.
Today’s Fun Fact of the Day is: Part of today’s story took place in 1985, so here are some fun facts about 1985.
- Sports Champions: Kansas City Royals, San Francisco 49ers, Los Angeles Lakers, & Edmonton Oilers
- The University of Oklahoma won the NCAA football championship.
- The Titanic was found 370 miles from Newfoundland.
- Best Film was Out of Africa.
- Top 10 grossing films: Back to the Future, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Rock IV, The Color Purple, Out of Africa, Cocoon, The Jewel of the Nice, Witness, The Goonies, Spies Like Us.
- Whitney Houston’s self titled album was the top selling album of the year.
Friday Forum
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What I Learned Yesterday:
Well, as I mentioned on Friday, we were under a high alert for severe weather over the weekend. Fortunately, the weather did not get nearly as bad as predicted. We did get a lot of rain, and quite a few people sustained damage due to flooding, but the Oklahoma City metro didn’t get hit with any tornados over the weekend. However, that didn’t stop us from being prepared just in case.
For those of you who live outside the midwest, you may hear me talk about tornadoes and wonder why anyone would choose to live here. I understand that sentiment. After all, I feel the same way about areas that some of you may call home. But for those of us who have lived here a long time, tornadoes are just part of life.
It’s fairly common for me to have a conversation with someone who has just learned that I’m from Oklahoma and soon get peppered with questions about the weather. I love these types of conversations. In fact, I had one just last week with someone who lives in California. One of my favorite things to tell people is about the amazing weather technology we have here. It is truly second to none in the entire world. Because of that, we can tell EXACTLY where a tornado is.
I have literally sat on my couch with relative calm as a tornado blew by just 2 miles from my house. Because the guys on TV can show me exactly where it’s at, I know whether or not I need to get in my storm cellar. Of course, it also depends on the severity of the storm too. If it would have been an F5 tornado that was 2 miles from my house, I would have been in the storm cellar. But to those who don’t live here, it sounds insane to imagine sitting on your couch while a tornado is that close.
My first memory of having a close call with a tornado came in 1985. I was in 3rd grade. My memory was that I was visiting my grandparents for my birthday when the tornado hit. However, my birthday is in mid February, which is really early for a tornado to hit Oklahoma. However, after a bit of research, it turns out that there was an early tornado that year, just 2 weeks after my birthday on March 3, 1985. So it’s pretty reasonable that I was spending the weekend with my grandparents for my birthday.
Whatever the cause was, I was definitely not home when it hit. At that time we lived in a trailer house on a couple of acres of land a few miles south of Guthrie, OK. Our trailer received no damage. The one across the street from us was split in half. A high school kid was home alone at the time, but he walked away just fine. Our home was about a quarter of a mile off of a two lane road and on the west side of that road was another trailer park. Where the trailers in our area were spread apart because we all had some land, the ones on the other side of the road were all together in rows.
I really didn’t think the storm had been bad until our school bus went through the neighborhood to pick up kids for school the next day. The destruction was unlike anything I’d ever seen. Some of the trailers were okay, but there was a massive pile of debris. It looked like many of the homes had been put into a blender and then dumped into one big pile. I was shocked by what I saw.
It was all I thought about for weeks. I drew maps that depicted the path I thought the storm had taken and I talked about it during show and tell for weeks after that.
I’ve seen the power of these storms time and time again over the years. It’s one thing to make a trailer house look like it has been through a blender, but I’ve seen tornadoes do the same thing to structures much more sturdy than a trailer. I’ve seen them have so much power they even suck the grass out of the ground.
So we respect them. We respect the men and women who work tirelessly this time of year to keep all of us safe. When they tell us to be on high alert, we do it.
So Saturday morning we got up and began to make sure we were ready for the worst. My wife and daughter got our emergency kit together, cleaned out the storm cellar, and made sure we were ready to take cover should it come to that.
But it didn’t come to that. It didn’t even come close to coming to that. We got some rain. It was a lot of rain, but that’s it. No high winds. No tornado sirens. No hail.
Here’s what I learned.
Was it a waste of time to get our emergency kit ready and our storm cellar prepared? We’ve lived in this house for almost 6 years and we’ve had the storm cellar for 5 of those years. I’ve never had to get into it. My family has had to use it once for a false alarm.
Was it a waste of money to get the storm shelter? What if it never saves our lives? Will it have been a waste then? No, I don’t think so.
Do you know what the Boy Scouts motto is? It a simple two-word phrase, “Be prepared.” There is a lot of wisdom packed into those two little words.
These words are the reason we have all sorts of insurance. These words are the reason we wear seat belts. These words are the reason young parents carry a diaper bag full of spare diapers. Sure, the fresh one you put on the baby right before you left the house might do the job, but then again, it might not. Be prepared.
Just over a year ago I did an episode of SILY called Live Like No One Else. In that episode I talked about how we’d cancelled some travel plans just to play it safe with our finances. TV Talk was shutting down and, while my business was growing, we were going to play it safe.
We had saved up quite a bit of money the previous year in preparing for me to quit my corporate job, and we wanted to be prepared in case things got tough. In that episode I recorded last year, I was sure that I would continue to add clients quickly and the decision to have cancelled our travel would have been unnecessary. I was wrong.
Over the next 6 months we saw the leanest months we’ve ever had. No new clients were landed. Our expenses greatly exceeded our income. We had to pay two massive tax payments. Our savings account was draining fast. We cut back as many expenses as we could. We ate sandwiches for lunch and dinner 6 days a week every week for over 8 months.
Finally, our savings account was down to one month of expenses and we had a big tax payment due. Kari and I were stressed.
Then things took a turn upward. I landed several new clients and started getting quite a few consulting sessions. My in-laws discovered a savings bond that my wife’s grandmother had bought for her years before. It was now mature and it was the perfect amount to cover our tax payment.
This entire calendar year has been in the black for us. We are no longer bleeding cash, my business is growing, and it looks like our season in the desert is over. We made it.
Why did we make it? We were prepared. I also believe that God’s hand was upon us every step of the way. He provided exactly what we needed. I also learned a lot about my business during that lean time that I never would have learned otherwise. But because of God’s provision and because we were prepared, we made it.
So today’s lesson is clear. We need to be prepared. Sometimes we prepare for times that will actually come, and sometimes we prepare for times that never come. However, in each case, we are better off being prepared than we are otherwise.
One other thing I’ve learned is this. If we are prepared, and that day doesn’t come for us, it may come for our neighbor and if we’re prepared, we’ll be in the perfect spot to lend a hand, share some love, and make someone else’s world a better place.
I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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