By Andrew Branch
After spending Tuesday night (Jan. 28) stranded at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Ala., one mom told pastor Bill Boyd her child summed up the ordeal with much more enthusiasm than most adults felt about the situation: “Mommy, that was so fun. When are we going to do that again?” Most people were far less sanguine about the icy weather that wreaked havoc across much of the South this week, closing schools and highways, grounding flights, and contributing to at least a dozen deaths from traffic accidents and one mobile home fire.
“There are still some places today that you can’t get to, but we’re all coming out of it now,” Boyd told me Thursday as he retrieved his wife’s abandoned car from a road not far from their home. Boyd spent Tuesday night with about 65 stranded friends and strangers at his church. Despite the frustrations that rained down on the city along with the snow, Boyd said he was encouraged by how many Christians turned the situation into an opportunity to serve: “You kind of start to go back to daily life, hopefully with a renewed perspective of the gospel.”
Two of the hardest hit cities were Atlanta and Birmingham, where 2 inches of snow Tuesday turned to ice that coated roads as schools and businesses closed almost simultaneously. Commutes normally measured in minutes stretched into hours. One Atlanta woman’s 12-mile trip home took 16 hours. Another woman gave birth while stuck in traffic. And between Atlanta, Birmingham, and Hoover, Ala., at least 8,000 students spent the night at their schools, with police and the National Guard rescuing dozens more from stranded buses as temperatures dipped into the teens. Motorists took shelter anywhere: at fire stations, grocery stores, and churches.
Read more at http://www.worldmag.com/2014/01/snow_shelter_and_renewed_gospel_perspective