A visitor from afar could see people smiling in this wreckage and think they are insane.
A visitor – from a place where people don’t talk about Jesus like a close friend – might expect anguish, or even fury.
At least 130 people died. Along the river, rolled cars and rubble look caught mid-motion. Media outlets have searched for explanations. They reported on the county’s slow warnings, a shortage of federal weather staff due to Trump’s budget cuts, and how climate change amplified the storm.
But people here are not looking for blame. They stand next to downed power lines and busted windshields and insist there’s no good reason to be angry. Two teenagers talk in a coffee shop about how they survived the flood. Their brother did not. The eldest smiles and says his family is at peace. Their father testified in church that he knows with everything in him that his son is not lost, but in a better place, an infinite place, infinitely more important than anything down here.
If you are a visitor thinking of the dead – dozens of little children in a Christian summer camp – and you hold that thought next to the sight of a smiling woman who looks at the sky and says, “If they’re 12 or under, they go immediately to heaven,” you could recoil.
You could also remember Lamentations. Many people here are speaking in scripture, after all. I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of the Lord’s wrath.
A man whose family was separated by the river when it rose 25 feet, who clung to a tree above rushing water, who begged for the rain to end. And when it had, who learned his baby nephew had been pulled from his sister’s arms to his death.
You have slain without pity. You have covered yourself with a cloud so that no prayer can get through.
There are trees lying flat, branches warped by water. People who were caught under debris in the flood. Pavement lifted, roads destroyed, routes blocked by crushed cars.
He has barred my way with blocks of stone; he has made my paths crooked.
People who punched through windows or walls to escape their home. People who survived by swimming, whose family members did not.
The waters closed over my head, and I thought I was about to perish.
You can ask people here: Aren’t you angry? If not with the people who failed you, at least with God?
Of course not, they will tell you. They will say it lots of ways, telling lots of stories. They will tell you about addiction, about hemorrhaging to near death. They will tell you about the sexual abuse they suffered as a toddler, they will tell you about the daughter they lost in a head-on collision. The end is the same in each case, and if it is not borrowing exact language from Lamentations, it is paraphrasing faithfully.
Yet this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning.
What God Has for Us
The morning of Friday, July 11, three dozen strangers to Betty Matteson are shoveling mud out of her house.
Nearly everything the 94-year-old Matteson owns is in one of two piles: the very muddy things that can’t be saved out back, and the less-muddy things that might have a chance out front.
The saving pile has some order to it, like the world’s wettest estate sale. Paintings with dark bottoms and clean tops leaned against each other, pottery and crystal spread out on a desk, Medicare documents with the ink blown out in a filing cabinet.
Dividing the to-toss and to-keep piles is Matteson’s house, built in 1929. It has a stone facade. In the family room that overlooks the river, the vaulted ceiling beams are made of tough cypress wood, like the trees outside. Inside, you can see the waterline above your head on every wall, about 7 feet from the hardwood floor. Industrial fans are blowing, and a man is rolling a wheelbarrow full of dirt. Outside, other men are sweating, chain-sawing fallen trees into reasonable chunks to transport.
“I think we were all praying. I was.” – Betty Matteson, who waited in her attic for the flood to recede
A pickup truck passing the house on State Highway 39 slows to a stop, and a man riding in the bed of it stands up and calls out: “Need a pair?” One of the helpers in Matteson’s yard runs over, and the man in the pickup tosses him black leather boots, the kind that are steel-toed and might cost $200. I ask if they know each other. The man in the truck says, “No, I just saw his boots. They’re soaked.” And they are – square-toe cowboy boots coated in mud.
The crew here at Matteson’s house includes three skid-steers, an excavator, and more than 30 Christians from the Cypress Creek Church in Wimberley, Texas, a two-hour drive away.
“You see that window?” says a man with tattoos poking out of his bright orange shirtsleeve. “That’s the attic where this 94-year-old woman survived.”
He is Blake McLean. He says he doesn’t know Betty Matteson “from Adam,” but his church received a prayer request from Matteson’s niece.
Behind Matteson’s house runs the usually peaceful Guadalupe River – the one that swelled July 4 to twice its normal size. Now, the river looks like a creek you could rock-hop over without getting your feet wet. But it is surrounded by evidence of the flood. Many trees are toppled, others stand serene as ever with bizarre objects caught in branches 30 feet up – warped metal roofing, a toy truck.
And then there’s an actual car. Down on the river bank. White, crumpled like a wad of paper, with one seat pulled out and placed upright on the ground. There’s a yellow X spray-painted on the crushed hood. “Once an X is there, that means that it’s been cleared. It’s not to say there wasn’t an unfortunate person in there,” McLean says.
Hours away in Georgetown, Matteson is sitting in a dining room chair with a bed pillow next to her daughter, Sherry. She wears the same nightgown she was in when she was awoken in the wee hours of July 4. She says this is the only dress she owns now, but that doesn’t seem to bother her. She gently rubs her forearms as she recalls her survival.
She says it was her grandson who woke her up, who somehow got her up the stairs to the attic, although she can’t remember that trip at all.
He was visiting for the holiday, as were several other family members. They all made it upstairs, crowded next to boxes and an artificial Christmas tree covered by a plastic sheet.
Black water had risen up the stairs, pictures show. Only four dry steps remained. Matteson says the house creaked like a boat, and the small group of family members (plus a few strangers from the B&B next door) sat wordless, as Matteson recalls. They could hear the water sloshing against the walls below the attic windows. “I think we were all praying. I was.”
It was Matteson’s grandson, Barry, who climbed out of one window, where the river was rushing a couple feet below him, Matteson says. On the roof, he tied a string of Christmas lights around the chimney with the idea that maybe the family could rappel down when water reached them in the attic.
When Barry came back in through the window, he knelt before Matteson. He held both of her hands in his, she remembers. “He said, ‘Nonie, do you want to pray with me?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’” She doesn’t remember the words he said, just that it was beautiful.
“Within about 10 minutes, things got quiet outside,” Matteson says. “And within 15 minutes, it started slowly going down.”
Maybe Matteson’s family could have been warned earlier, but Matteson says that thought didn’t even cross her mind.
And maybe it shouldn’t be McLean and his team of good-hearted people cleaning Matteson’s home for free. Maybe it should be a team paid for by federal funds. Does McLean think FEMA is doing enough to help people recover? Maybe, maybe not, but that’s the government’s job. He’s focused on his job: “the church’s job.” He says that is to show Betty Matteson how much God loves her, to let that love from God flow right through his body and into this work, like a prayer built of actions instead of words.
“We all have a job to do. That’s why me and some of my friends are here.” He points down at the river full of debris, toward the crushed car. “You look at this. This is the world. But this,” he looks up to the blue sky, and lifts his hand above his head, palm up like in worship. “This is what God has for us. That’s beautiful. That’s just as good as it was before the flood.”
How a Thing Like This Could Happen
It’s a postcard-perfect summer sky. Just some slow-moving, backlit clouds. But a few days ago, that’s where all this destruction came from.
Four months’ worth of rain poured down in four hours. That’s how the Christian Texas climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe put it in a piece for Time magazine. Data shows the downpour was so bizarre that “natural variability alone cannot explain the increase” – that’s how an international team of climate experts put it in their findings published July 7. They concluded that this flood was intensified by human-driven climate change.
But to a lot of residents here, conversation about reducing emissions or increasing funding for federal agencies that study and deal with disasters – that doesn’t feel like empathetic help. It feels partisan and opportunistic.
“I think it’s futile for them to be angry, the people who are angry,” Matteson says. “What does that accomplish?”
NASA climate scientist Kate Marvel agrees. As a physicist, she tracks climate-fueled disasters closely. This one hit close to home, even though she lives more than 1,000 miles away in New York. Her own son was at summer camp – his first time away from his family – when she learned about the girls killed by flooding at Camp Mystic.
“You don’t kick people while they’re down,” Marvel says. “And it’s also not their fault, right? Climate change is caused by greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere. It’s not caused by people having different political opinions from you.”
To ask these grieving communities to turn their pain into political fuel: “That’s not fair,” Marvel says. “Those of us who are lucky enough to not be dealing with climate-related tragedy right now, it’s on us to step up and to take on some of that burden.”
But why is climate action partisan? There shouldn’t be tension between Christian faith and efforts to reverse climate change: That’s the argument that Hayhoe has been making for years. God, she says, asks us to be stewards of the Earth. God asks us to protect our neighbors.
But of course, there is tension.
When Trump visited Hunt on Friday, he said: “Nobody has any idea how and why a thing like this could happen.” It’s a broad statement, one that could be said about any tragedy of this scale. And yet, the “how” is, to some extent, explainable. Climate scientists like Hayhoe explain that our globe’s warmer air holds more moisture, so storms fall heavier than 50 years ago. Disasters always happened, but now they happen much more often.
When a reporter asked Trump about government failures Friday, he said: “Only an evil person would ask a question like that.” On July 8, Gov. Greg Abbott answered a reporter’s question about government responsibility similarly: “Who’s to blame? Know this, that’s the word choice of losers.”
Matteson says she loves Trump and his policies. One of her greatest wishes is to hear his voice on the phone, so she can thank him for coming to Hunt and looking at what the storm did.
Kerr County went roughly 77% for Trump last election. She says of people who don’t understand how her community votes: “They don’t understand our lives here. For one thing, they don’t know we’re independent, self-sufficient, and that we care about our neighbors.”
A Child Overhead
Among debris on the bank of the river, there is a white sign with a spray-painted Bible verse, the shortest one in the Bible: Jesus wept.
This verse comes just before the resurrection of Lazarus, foreshadowing Jesus’ resurrection on Easter.
Death. Foreshadowing. Resurrection. The Bible does that again in the Book of Revelation, when God commands, “Pour out the seven bowls of God’s wrath on earth.” First, tribulations. Then, Jesus returns.
“You don’t kick people while they’re down.” – Kate Marvel, NASA climate scientist
“All of us in the body of Christ have very important things to do in these last days,” says a woman with twinkling blue eyes, silver hair, and a baby blue dress that a baby goat was just chewing on. She is holding the bleating kid in Hunt on July 11, feeding it milk from a bottle. She is sitting outside a coffee shop across from a fire station where some think President Trump will come by to thank local first responders and volunteers.
The twinkly-eyed woman is Karen Bock, a hairdresser who says she is headed to Bible college for a career change in a matter of months. Her house didn’t flood, but a close friend died. She’d just called him the day before the flood.
The day after the flood, Bock was walking along Highway 39 and heard a helicopter overhead. She says it was headed in the direction of the hospital, and hanging below it was a basket, carrying what she thought was a child – possibly a baby, probably dead.
“I cried and prayed from deep within my heart,” she says. “The Holy Spirit was literally crying through me in deep prayer to God, a prayer that only He can pray, a perfect prayer that cannot be uttered in human language, but a heartfelt prayer that cannot be understood. Much happens in the Spirit realm when we cry out from the very depths of our being for others who are hurting. Like I was actually feeling the pain of so many people.”
Trump didn’t arrive at the fire station where a few people waited, but he was just down the road, in a roundtable with state and local officials talking about the tragedy.
He said he’d never seen anything like it. He described the century-old trees ripped from the ground. Wearing a suit and a white baseball cap with “USA” embroidered in blue, he said he was amazed by the incredible spirit of the families he and Melania had just met in Central Texas: “I don’t even know how they do it.”
This article appears in July 18 • 2025.
