Hang On

Though I love the icy North Dakota prairies I call home, my first home was the tropical Atlantic coast of south Florida.

In the year before I was married, I rode out three hurricanes there with my family, standing in awe beside my brother at the stillness in the eye of the storm.

The eye is the only calm part of a hurricane, from the frenzied people stocking up on gas and water beforehand to the lashing, otherworldly winds in the dreaded eyewall. 

The entire harbor was blown away that year, and we were without power for a month.

One thing that has remained through every hurricane is the mangrove trees.

The Ais Indians called them “walking trees” because of the aerial roots which make them look like they move from one place to another. I remember watching my dad and his brothers walking on the mangrove roots when they were fishing because they made a natural walkway above the water.

Their tangled root systems look like a hopeless snarl, but it was those same snarled roots that enabled the trees to endure any storm.

My husband and I recently took our children to visit Florida, and we enjoyed a kayaking tour through the mangrove tunnels of the lagoon near where we grew up. God crafted these trees to be able to hang on no matter what. With roots below to anchor them and roots above to “snorkel” when necessary, they are able to cope with hurricane or calm, flood or drought.

As we paddled through the most biodiverse estuary in North America, I thought about an elderly woman who attended the same church that I did when I was a child- Mrs. Leo. She always had a smile and a kind word. Her husband, Ed, had served in World War II and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Her son lost his life serving in Vietnam. She was a woman who had held on through many storms, not just in spite of the snarls of life but because of them.

As a young teenager, when I was asked to travel the two thousand miles to North Dakota for the first time, I asked Mrs. Leo to be my prayer partner. I made a globe magnet for her fridge, and she prayed for me everyday. Her faith in Jesus evidenced itself in her moment-by-moment conversations with Him, and her vibrant stability encouraged me, enabling me to go to a faraway place to serve Him.

Mangrove trees don’t just hang on for themselves. They create a stable habitat for myraids of fish, shellfish, seagrasses, and jellyfish. When lots of mangrove trees grow together in one place, they make it possible for other organisms to endure the hostile environment of the seashore. 

Mrs. Leo had learned to hang on to Jesus, persevering through the most difficult of snarly times, and her stability gave me the environment I needed to grow spiritually. 

When Mrs. Leo was in her nineties, she told me, “I still have your magnet on my fridge, and I pray for you everyday. I know the Lord is with you.”

Hang on, dear soul. You may just be the estuary the next generation needs to thrive.