Thoughts on a Fallen Steeple

A wind came without warning, strong enough to take a steeple clean off a church and yet restrained enough to spare everything else. When it was over, a sanctuary stood as it always had. No shattered windows. No collapsed walls. Only a steeple, white and fiberglass, torn by force, lying in pieces, carefully gathered and set aside by those tasked with the cleanup.

I have been sitting with that image.

A steeple has a practical purpose. It marks a place. It helps the eye find where the faithful gather. Symbolically, it reaches upward, a visible insistence that there is more than what surrounds us, that heaven matters here on earth. It is not a church, that is the people inside. But it announces a church.

And yet, when the storm came, it did not touch the heart of the building. It took only what was highest, most visible, most exposed.

After a storm, a church will look for what might mend what has been torn. Its eyes travel outward, searching for a solution. And sometimes the answer has been standing close by, quietly formed by the same weather that did the damage. Not loud, not sudden, but steady. That kind of presence does not announce itself. It simply stays. And in staying, it becomes a signal.

As for how the steeple itself will be restored, who knows. That work will come in its own time, with its own questions and decisions. That, I suspect, is another story altogether.

Perhaps that is one way to read this without rushing to meaning. The signal was removed, not the substance. What once helped people find a place may no longer be essential. And that is not an invitation to rest, but to attend more carefully to what remains.

The wind did not dismantle a church. It stripped away a symbol.

What struck me most was the aftermath, walking among the fragments. They were not scattered. They were laid out in order. Torn and broken, yes, but handled with care. I found something almost confessional about that. Renewal rarely comes through spectacle. More often it arrives through careful attention, through honest examination of what we have relied on, through patience with what must be sorted before anything is rebuilt.

A steeple will return someday. But not yet. And that waiting feels important.

Scripture teaches that God often allows absence to do its work before restoration. The disciples had to sit with an empty tomb before they understood resurrection. In the meantime, a church lives and worships without its familiar silhouette, without the upward-pointing marker that once announced itself to the town.

That absence quietly asks a question no sermon needs to state. If nothing points heavenward for us, do we still look up?

In my constant search for meaning, it is tempting to frame moments like this as warnings or judgments. But nothing here feels humiliating or destructive. A sanctuary stands. A people remain. A ministry continues. The foundation was not touched. Perhaps what was touched was what could be confused for the thing itself.

What was lifted high was also what could be torn away.

And maybe the most faithful posture is this. God has not explained Himself, because He often does not. Scripture leaves room for wisdom to grow where certainty would close the door too quickly. Not every act of God arrives with interpretation attached.

A storm passed through.
A steeple fell.
A church did not.

Growth continues. Worship carries on under open skies, with fewer markers and more attentiveness.

That may not be a message shouted from the heights.
But it is a truth worth listening to.

Perhaps that is one way to read this.