During Floods Like This the Best Prayers aren't Spoken

The City of Snohomish on Thursday Dec. 11th, 2025

As I crossed the bridge on Highway 9 this morning to get to work, I was overwhelmed by the sight of the turbid, brown waters that had swallowed the highway and spilled deep into Snohomish, WA. The river had erased property lines, turning main streets into churning channels. This flood is going to be devastating for so many people.

As I sat comfortably in my car “above it all,” my initial thought was one of thanksgiving: “Dear God, thank you that I am not like all those people down there!” But the thought caught in my throat. A cold realization followed my initial relief: this cheap thanksgiving, born of comparison, was hollow. It was the Pharisee’s prayer in Luke 8:11-12 ("God, I thank you that I am not like those other people, like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get”) ...not God's calling. True gratitude demands humility, not a safe distance. True gratitude is born out of humility for whatever we have, not out of comparison.

And so, as I think and pray for these folks sandbagging, packing up what they can, and watching in disbelief as their homes are overtaken by rising waters, my heart calls out to each and every one of these folks as I think of the long road they will have in the months ahead... after the flood waters recede ... as they try and try again to put things back into order again.

This "long road"—Las Posadas in Spanish, the painful, forced journey toward shelter and normalcy—has echoed throughout human history. The same desperate resiliency I see in the eyes of these flood victims are in my understanding of Mary and Joseph in our Christmas story. They, too, had a long road ahead of them. Amid Mary’s third trimester, the emperor, Caesar Augustus, ordered that all should return to the town of their ancestors to be counted. Joseph’s ancestral home was Bethlehem...a 4–6-day journey by foot. But Adam Hamilton, in his book The Journey: Walking the Road to Bethlehem, shares that he believes that Mary and Joseph probably chose a longer, safer path to Bethlehem because the shorter path would have meant traveling through Samaria. And Samaria would have been a dangerous trek for most Jewish people due to the animosity that was held between them. Their journey may have been more like 9 or 10 days! And much like the journey of these flood victims, this was not just a physical journey, but a profound spiritual for all of us that asks us to look past our own high ridges and recognize the shared humanity in everyone facing the rising waters.

Mary and Joseph’s long journey was indeed difficult, but it wasn’t without moments of grace. In Bethlehem, for instance, Joseph’s family opened up their home to Mary and Joseph, and even though their house was packed to the gills with family coming for the census, they offered up the only thing they had available. No, it wasn’t the “inn” (the guest room...Kataluma in Greek) but many scholars now believe that Mary and Joseph were sheltered in an actual house, the lower part of the house where a donkey or cow might have been brought in inclement weather.  This area of the house would have been warm and clean and in many ways the manger was a safe, warm place to lay a newborn!

In other words, Joseph’s distant relatives flung open their hearts and offered all they had! And my guess is that all along their long journey, from Nazareth to Galilee to Egypt and back again, many kind and generous folks did the same for Mary and Joseph!

The Christmas story is at its heart, a story about hospitality. For in the baby Jesus, God, in so many wonderful ways, is flinging wide the portal to his heart to each of us. God knows that each of us has had and is on a “long journey” of our own. And in Christ, God is offering each of us a safe place for the “night,” to rest and refresh and make new! May each of us learn to do the same!

I leave you with the lyrics for a song we are singing in choir for the Christmas season. It’s a song called: These Bells Will Ring.

“These bells will ring when peace is come. And peace will come when the world is one.

This Christmas Day reach out your hand to those who struggle to stand.

Save your prayers, reach out your hand to those who struggle to stand.

This Christmas day come join the call. May freedom’s song be sung by all.”  

As I look out over the homes devastated by this 100-year flood, my tendency is to “say” a prayer...but what these folks need is a prayer lived out with hands and feet and heart. Just like Mary and Joseph, these folks need our hearts flung wide open and ready to help.

Your pastor and friend, with you on the long journey, Brook