Lessons from Whoville After a Real-World Flood
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 22 December 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, after a flash flood tore through his church, Stephen Rusiniak stood ankle-deep in water and debris, not quite sure where to begin. The rooms where Sunday school once echoed had collapsed into a mess of ruined walls and floating Bibles. But it’s what happened next that really left a mark.
What Stephen witnessed reminded him of a scene from How the Grinch Stole Christmas. After disaster struck and the citizens of Whoville were left with nothing, they still gathered together to lend a hand to their fellow neighbors and celebrate each other despite the wreckage left behind. Stephen joins us today to describe how he saw a little bit of Dr. Seuss in the kindhearted response from his local community.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an IHeart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:31.6 | This is L Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including yours. |
| 0:35.2 | Send them to Our American Stories.com. |
| 0:38.3 | They're some of our favorites, and man, they just keep coming. |
| 0:43.2 | Up next, we have a piece from one of our regular contributors, Stephen Rossiniak. |
| 0:48.4 | This piece was published in his local newspaper. It's about a devastating flash flood that severely damaged Stephen's church and the surprising response from the community. |
| 0:55.9 | Stephen asked the director of music at the Packenac Community Church, Daniel Mullins, to read the story for us. Here's Daniel. |
| 1:04.8 | It was an image that I just couldn't shake. The residents of Huville had come together on that Christmas morning, |
| 1:13.2 | knowing full well that overnight the Grinch had absconded with their gifts, but still they |
| 1:19.2 | gathered as a community in faith and hope and love, all the while choosing to look beyond the |
| 1:26.5 | previous night's somber circumstances, focusing instead |
| 1:31.0 | on the present, focusing on what needed to be done, and most importantly, focusing on everything |
| 1:38.3 | that truly mattered. |
| 1:41.4 | I couldn't help but notice the similarities between Dr. Seuss' imaginary morning in the book |
| 1:47.0 | How the Grinch Stole Christmas and the real-life morning at the Packanac Community Church. |
| 1:53.0 | Where just 14 hours earlier, a sudden flash flood had triggered unbelievably powerful waves of dirt-filled |
| 2:00.0 | water containing copious amounts of mulch, leaves, and logs, |
| 2:04.6 | to come crashing through the church's downstairs windows, |
| 2:08.6 | and likewise, through the windows of the attached cooperative nursery school. |
| 2:13.6 | It was a flood so intense and so fast moving that within seconds it had completely destroyed |
| 2:20.3 | the church offices, classrooms, files, and everything else in its path. |
... |
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