thankful thursday: tornado recovery.

here are a few things i've been thankful for in the last week or so since the big tornado in moore:

1. pretty skies.

if i have to hear tornado sirens go off almost every afternoon, at least i get to see pretty skies at sunset. it's probably the only good thing about all these crazy storms. 

2. chick-fil-a.

the corporate chick-fil-a folks sent their big red truck to norman this week to help with tornado recovery. this truck can crank out 800 sandwiches an hour, y'all. isn't that insane?! some friends of ours own the Chick-fil-As in norman and moore, and they were asking for volunteers to help distribute the sandwiches to families and volunteers in moore. i was so thankful for the generosity of chick-fil-a and for a practical way to serve and love people. i mean, who doesn't want a hot chicken sandwich?

"food is symbolic of love when words are inadequate." -- alan d. wolfelt

3. oklahoma pride.

i've always been an obnoxiously proud texan (and still am), but this week i tried to channel some pride for the okie state. we threw an oklahoma-themed party on wednesday night with our missional community to watch blake shelton's healing in the heartland concert. let me back up. we desperately tried to get tickets for the concert, but they sold out in seconds, so this was our best effort at a plan B. our party was complete with a soundtrack of songs about oklahoma, every oklahoma t-shirt we own (thank you, thunder) hanging in our living room, arrows pointing to oklahoma on our giant wall map, a garland of famous oklahomans hanging in our kitchen, and oklahoma-shaped cookies, of course. home sweet 'homa.

we googled "famous oklahoma food" and fried chicken was the answer... who knew?

4. community.

i've been extra thankful for community recently. on a macro level, it's been so cool to see churches from all over the okc metro come together to serve moore, and on a micro level, i've loved watching our prov road community love each other well through all this craziness and seeing the different ways everyone has used their skills and connections to serve our neighbors to the north.

this picture has nothing to do with the tornado recovery, but everything to do with community. the saturday before the tornado, a lot of us ran the super fan 5k that our friend's work put on. it was a great way to support her and all do something fun together!

5. skype.

this doesn't really fit the tornado recovery theme of this post, but i just got off a skype call with one of our favorites that just moved down to houston, and i'm just so thankful for skype. whoever invented it is a genius. we already miss them so much, but somehow it makes it a little bit better that we can see their faces and get a virtual tour of their house. i wish i had taken a screen shot. oh well. thanks, skype!