Governor Mike Braun declared a statewide disaster emergency on Thursday, August 13, and activated the Indiana National Guard for water rescues. He formally requested a presidential emergency declaration the following day, and President Donald Trump approved it after a Saturday phone call with the governor, freeing up to $5 million in federal resources for response and recovery. Fifteen counties, including Marion County, along with cities such as Carmel and Noblesville, have issued their own local disaster declarations.
More than 11 inches of rain fell east of Indianapolis over three days beginning August 11. Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett called it the city's worst flooding in more than thirty years. Nearly 130,000 utility customers were without power statewide as of Sunday afternoon, and more than 350 people were evacuated in Delaware County alone.
Among the dead: a 4-year-old boy in Jennings County, a 58-year-old woman in Lake County, an 86-year-old woman in Porter County, a 32-year-old man in LaPorte County, and a 31-year-old man in Henry County. Eighteen-year-old Matthew Morey, a recent high school graduate bound for Purdue University, jumped into the swollen Mississinewa River near Muncie with three friends on Wednesday. Deputies pulled the other three to safety. Morey's body was recovered days later, on Saturday.
Water That Rises Without Asking Permission
A river does not check a calendar before it rises. It does not ask whether a man has made his peace with God, whether a family has said everything that needed saying, whether an eighteen-year-old boy headed for college in the fall has any business dying in August. It simply rises, the way every hidden thing in a fallen world eventually rises to the surface. And when it does, the record that stood for over a century gets broken in a single afternoon.
My friend, that is the plain truth about this life that men spend their days trying not to think about. You are not owed tomorrow. The 86-year-old woman in Porter County had lived a long life. The 4-year-old boy in Jennings County had barely begun his. Neither death consulted a schedule. Scripture has always been honest about this, plainer than the six o'clock news:
"For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away." (James 4:14)
A vapor does not linger for a debate. It is here, and then the wind takes it. That is not meant to frighten you into despair — it is meant to wake you up. Indiana families this week are learning, in the hardest school there is, that plans made on a Tuesday can be undone by a Wednesday flood. A boy who thought he had a semester to get ready for Purdue did not have an afternoon.
The governor called out the National Guard. The president signed the declaration. Sandbags went up, boats went out, and neighbors pulled neighbors from rising water — and thank God for every hand that reached into that current. Government exists for exactly such hours, and it is a mercy when it moves fast and does its job. But no National Guard unit and no federal dollar can reach the deeper flood, the one that rises in every human heart and threatens to carry a soul under for good. That flood has a name older than 1913: sin, and the wages it pays are death, first the kind that takes the body and then the kind that does far worse.
There is only one bank of ground that does not wash out. Not a levee. Not a forecast. A Person.
"He only is my rock and my salvation; he is my defence; I shall not be greatly moved." (Psalm 62:6)
Jesus Christ did not come to hand you a better sandbag. He came to stand in the flood in your place, to take the full weight of what sin deserves, and to rise up out of the grave so that everyone who trusts Him has solid ground under their feet no matter what the water does. The families burying loved ones this week in Jennings County and Lake County and along the Mississinewa need more than sympathy from a distance. They need to know that death, for the one who belongs to Christ, is not the last word. It is a doorway.
You who are reading this in a dry house tonight, water not yet at your door — do not mistake the calm for safety. The vapor is already thinning. Make your peace with God today, while today is still called today, before the record you cannot see coming breaks in your own life.