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Her name was Diane. And when I met her she was wearing the same mask and gloves as I was. But when I asked if she knew who lived in this house, I saw tears building up behind her glasses as she said "my mother". When I met Diane she was pushing sopping wet pieces of ceiling into a pile in the middle of the kitchen. The kitchen she grew up in.

This property was considered a complete loss, since the water level was well into the attic. Her 80 year old mother evacuated twice, leaving 8 decades of belongings behind her. As you can see in the video, nearly nothing was in tact. Diane told me that everything in the house was to be thrown away EXCEPT for two items. 1. The stained-glass light fixture that hung above where the kitchen table used to stand. And 2. a cookie jar.

The cookie jar originally belonged to her grandmother and was the ONLY item that still existed in their family that was hers. She described it as a pale pink depression glass jar about 6 inches tall by a 6 inch base. And I'll confess, that when she was telling us to keep an eye out for it, I was looking at the situation and had little to no hope it'd show up. Let alone, in 1 piece.

Seeing as how a river had run through the house from west to east...and everything from the house had floated and drained into basically two bedrooms..... and settled like sardines in a jar....well, the odds weren't great. But about an hour later, Diane and I were sitting on the tailgate of a truck drinking water when my friend walked outside with it in his hands. The next 60 seconds will be tattooed on my brain for a long, long time. You would have thought that he had just rescued her child from a burning building, the way she shot up, ran over to him, grabbed the precious item from his hands, gave him a giant hug and starting saying "God is good. God is so good. while she embraced the cookie jar.

The magnitude of someone standing in the face of such loss and declaring "God is good!" with such conviction was a vision. A real-life snapshot of gratitude.

It gave me a lot to think about.