 It's a horrible thing, but you certainly learn a lot from the process. River came up over the road for quite some time and we had eight inches on the main floor of our house. The north wall and the south wall were off and it looked like a dollhouse standing there. The water level on the main floor had reached about two and a half to three feet. Do we walk away from the house? Can we afford to even rebuild? View what's in front of you in the case of a marathon, not a sprint. The University of Minnesota Extension and North Dakota State University Extension Service have developed Recovery After Disaster, the Family Financial Toolkit to assist in financial recovery from disaster. The toolkit is free and available at this website. These tools will help you think through the situation that you're in to establish priorities and decide what needs to be done and help you to act with purpose in moving forward after the disaster. It's not one big step we'd like it to be, but it's really a bunch of small steps going on. We saw a lot of people make some very, very difficult decisions in their own lives and for a good number of people that meant leaving. Resilience is important in your ability to deal with and adapt to change after a disaster. Resilience was an ability kind of built into us. Everyone has that ability, that's one of the first things to lay hold of. You have to advocate for yourself and you have to know what it is that you're wanting and know that you're in it for the long haul and to be really persistent and determined. It's important that they are connected to other people who they trust and that care about their circumstances and as they're going through the recovery that they can reach out if they have a particular need. It is important to recognize that your life will never be exactly the same as it was. Consider what you want your new reality to look like. Fostering hope, acting with purpose, connecting with others, taking care of yourself and searching for meaning can help you to determine what your new reality might be. Boy, when you face something like that and you come up on the other side, you know that you have the fortitude to be able to do that and in life you're going to have curves like that all the time. Stay positive and keep moving forward even though that your life all around you is falling apart and for a lot of people, go find somebody to talk to. Find an outlet, don't bottle it all up because it can really put you in a bad place in your life. A community arises out of a disaster, stronger, more deeply connected and great believers in themselves that whatever we face, we can face it together.