'I was praying and I kept telling them, 'It’s OK. I got you.' ' The tornado that struck Selma, Alabama, last week hit the Crosspoint Christian church's daycare. But the 70 children and teachers who huddled inside bathrooms escaped unharmed.
The hymn “Amazing Grace” floated across the lawn at Selma’s Crosspoint Church, where services were held outside because of the damage to the main sanctuary. The service also honored the quick-thinking teachers who got the children, ranging in age from infants to 5-year-olds, to the building’s inner bathrooms and shielded them with their own bodies as the twister roared over them.
“I was praying and I kept telling them, ‘It’s OK. I got you. You’re OK. I love y’all,’ ” Shana Lathan told her class as they huddled inside the bathroom. “There are so many people hurting here right now that there is sort of like a mutual misery, which requires a shared hope and a shared vision to help us to help each other through this,” the Rev. Leodis Strong said.His sermon for the day was titled “A Storm-Tested Faith.” Strong said the community’s faith is being tested because “this is an environment that we have to rely upon that relationship with God and put into practice the faith that we have developed.
At Blue Jean Selma Church, a racially diverse church with a name meant to convey that all are welcome in any attire they choose, there was a similar message. “Even in the midst of this we have hope,” Bob Armstrong, the church pastor, said.
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