The hurricane Iselle is moving towards us!

Hurricane Iselle is suppose to hit our island and our place tomorrow Thursday at around 2 PM (klokka 2 natt til fredag). So the café has closed down, the big corporate night meeting for the whole base is canceled (they never cancel that meeting!), all equipment in our classroom tent is packed and stacked in the middle of the tent, sandbags have been filled and loaded along the sides of vulnerable places and some have even gone and bought food and water supplies to last for a while.

We´re ready. I think. Bad case scenario some trees will fall over and we´ll have to stay in our rooms all afternoon and night while the hurricane is raging. Worst case scenario we´ll all have to evacuate into one room - all 500 of us - and bite nails and twist fingers while waiting for the storm to pass us by.

Last year there was a warning like this, and the base did a lot of work to prepare for it, and then nothing happened. This time they expect us not to be so lucky.

Tsunamies and hurricanes and tornadoes and all that are quite new to me, as a Norwegian. I´m totally unfamiliar with earthquakes and nature catastrophes! Maybe because we have so much bad weather all year around, we usually never get any crazy weather, and are extremely protected so far up north.

This week in our classroom tent has been quite the hurricane also. In different ways. In changes. And much more. The speaker of the week even drew a link between her teaching this week about the Holy Spirit (den hellige ånd) and the extreme weather that was approaching. Needless to say, we are all getting to know a different side of God this week. And in many ways, it is shaking us.

I´m kinda excited about this hurricane, I don´t know why. Just how there is nothing man can do to stop nature forces; the power, the will, the direction, the outcome. It speaks to me again about how small and insignificant we are, so powerless against such strong forces, so frail... In a big world, in the midst of a hurricane, I am weak and out of control.

Somehow that makes me excited.