The June 20, 2025 tornadoes in North Dakota.
- Julie R. Neidlinger
- 4 days ago
- 7 min read
Tornadoes cut across the nation randomly and without care, impartial to what is in their path, driven by air temperatures and wind fluctuations. It feels like chaos theory, a butterfly flaps its wings or a temperature inversion forms, and hundreds of miles away, lives are destroyed.
On June 21, 1971, three years before I was born and four years before strange things were happening on the farm, there was an F2 tornado that traveled about eight or so miles between Calio and Alsen, not too far from the family farm.
The most famous tornado in the state is the June 20, 1957, Fargo tornado, which cut a straight line from east of Fargo through the city and into Minnesota, taking ten lives with it. Thanks to the extensive damage documentation, that tornado aided in the creation of the Fujita scale about a decade later, with Fargo’s twister claiming an F5 rating.
This is all very interesting on a clinical level, but when you see the storm chasers rushing into your city, passing you on the highway, and posting live updates on social media, giddily announcing that there’s a perfect setup for destructive weather where you live, it’s a gut punch. It’s a reminder that we live in a culture so addicted and worn out by dopamine hits that we need human pain and terror as content just to get a click and a buzz.
Sixty-eight years to the day after Fargo’s tornado, we come to the tornadoes at Enderlin, North Dakota. As of this writing, we don’t know where the tornadoes fall on the scale.1 But we do know that three much-loved people died. There is no scale for that level of human pain.
I contacted a friend who lives in rural Enderlin to see if she was okay.
She lived about five miles from the path and was fine, but told of the heartbreak in the days after. The loss of three lives, with ten houses completely gone, is a severe wound for the small community. Missing or horrifically wounded livestock and other wildlife that had to be shot and put out of their misery. Debris splattered out for miles. Farm outbuildings disintegrated, fences down.
On that same night, further west behind those tornadoes that popped up near Jamestown, was a line of storms that produced intense winds spinning eastward, first in a straight line until past Bismarck, and then in a strange “wake low” pattern into what amounted to a category 3 hurricane over land.2 When it was all said and done, fourteen tornadoes had touched down, and the National Weather Service had to issue over 300 severe thunderstorm warnings and 75 tornado warnings in a 24-hour period.3 The photos and videos were dramatic and maybe even beautiful if terrifying is your thing, as long as you weren’t near them.
I wasn’t near them.
When I left Friday morning for camping, I took a look around the yard, wondering, based on the storm predictions of the day and the presence of all the storm chasers, what would be left when I got back.
That night, I was huddled over my phone around a campfire, flipping between exterior Ring cameras to see what happened when the storm hit Bismarck, and weather radar apps, where live storm chaser feeds showed the tornadoes forming and starting their death march. I gobbled up the social media feeds of meteorologists.4 As I watched the large Enderlin tornado form live on my small phone screen, I started to cry a bit, feeling a bit sick.
“This is terrible.”
I couldn’t look away.
I’m no different than anyone else, horrified yet hungry as chasers whoop and holler that a tornado is touching down and isn’t she a beauty. We must remember that the moment there’s debris, a human being is in pain. Someone is losing something or someone in that moment. While many storm chasers are first on the scene and aid in initial search and rescue, the fact cannot be lost: we go where there’s pain and terror and live stream it so others can consume it safely. It’s addictive.
“They dress the wounds of my people as though it were not serious,” Jeremiah 8:11 tells us, going on to say “peace, peace,” when there is none.
I know that’s about Israel, but I see a pattern of human nature. Maybe our modern-day version of this sentiment is eagerly consuming human misery clickbait and then popping in for a “thoughts and prayers” comment, which is only one step above the “good vibes only” promise when it comes to assuaging pain that we first got a thrill off of before checking ourselves. We leave broken people apologizing for still needing our help long after we’ve moved on.
On the drive home on Sunday, I started to notice some tree damage south of Harvey on Highway 3. At Steele, where we stopped for gas and coffee, they’d already collected their downed trees in a pile. The carnage further east and south on I-94 seemed impossibly far away as we headed west.
It made me ill to think about all the suffering, human and animal, the terror and fear. I think of how God pointed out to Jonah that he had concern for the people and also the many animals. Tornadoes are sometimes called the finger of God, and I wonder if He could not have snapped his fingers elsewhere.
It’s the question of the purpose of pain, one that a trite “everything happens for a reason” does not answer in the valley of the shadow of death. To our minds, at least, such pain is unreasonable. Being told that Jesus is our anchor is lost on us when it feels like we’re drowning. There is comfort knowing He walks with us during the dark times, but the comfort is small to start, easily dwarfed by louder things.
We go all kinds of places to find God, to feel something bigger than ourselves. We travel to beautiful places and take in spectacular natural vistas and amazing experiences. We are awed by displays, both horrific and lovely, of the power of the natural world.5 We don’t expect to see God in the lowest points of our lives, amidst destruction, loss, and all that makes up the aftermath. We don’t willingly go to such places as painful as that.
Can we find God there, when everything we hold dear is ripped away and stripped bare, when people are kind initially with thoughts and prayers and GoFundMe’s, but eventually drift off into their regular life while we’re still screaming inside? When our world stops, it hurts worse to know that it still goes on for those around us.
I don’t have the answer, beyond what I wrote on August 29, 2007, after the Northwood, North Dakota, tornado.
The cruelest thing is that life goes on.
Several things happened in our region this past weekend.
On Sunday morning, Pastor Bill passed away. He was young, early 40s, and the pastor at a small church in Northwood, North Dakota. That morning, the world stopped for his wife and family. And then that night, a mile-wide F4 tornado ripped through Northwood and all but destroyed it. That night, the world stopped for the whole town.
Elsewhere, a young man, a senior in a local high school, was killed in a motor vehicle accident, his car engulfed in flames. He was rushed to Fargo and died at the hospital. The world stopped for his friends and family that day.
Why doesn’t the world stop for everyone?
Somewhere, people are experiencing something horrible, something that has made their world crash to a dead stop, at this moment.
The world does not stop. Time does not stop. It continues on, ripping apart the people who are unable to move, dragging them forward anyway.
I don’t understand it.
But you know, the only building that wasn’t touched by that tornado was Pastor Bill’s church. And that young man who died? He was on the way home from the hospital after seeing his new daughter, born that very day.
This world keeps going, like that tornado.
It chews up everything, eventually, leaving nothing unscathed. It keeps going, but it offers up, every once in a while, this little pause: God allows some kind of mercy in the middle of what seems like unbearable and unthinkable cruelty.
A church still standing.
A daughter with a name.
It’s not a perfect resolution, a happy ending in a way we understand happiness. It’s a strange weighing of the scale in which pain and joy are on the same side somehow, someday. Not today. Not tomorrow.
Someday.
1 According to Meteorologist Eric Graves, based on radar data, the Enderlin tornado will be the 25th most intense radar signature archived in the United States, ranking number 1 for the state of North Dakota.
2 The straight line was likely a derecho, which I have experienced and is terrifying, though not determined as such at the time of writing. The line of thunderstorms was over 400 miles long, according to Meteorologist Jacob Morse.
Winds were over 100 mph with pressures under 1000mb, according to Mike’s Weather Page. As I watched the radar, I turned to my friend and was unsure if I was just nuts, but blurted out that “it looks like a hurricane with an eye!” This was a screenshot from the MyRadar App.
KX News Chief Meteorologist Kenny Miller called this aspect of the night’s weather a “once in a lifetime” storm that he’d never seen before in his career.
3 The National Weather Service listed 13 tornadoes.
On Sunday, June 22, Medina was confirmed to have had an EF-1 tornado, bringing the list to 14 as of this writing.
The number of warnings comes from information provided by KX News Chief Meteorologist Kenny Miller.
4 In the midst of the meteorologists doing their best to update and warn people during the insane weather, I saw at least two meteorologists who had to tell people to stop being nasty towards them in the comments section, one of which was on vacation and still trying to help. Unbelievable.
5 There is no such thing as Mother Nature. After shocking weather, people cry out how mighty Mother Nature is, how unpredictable she is, how amazing she is. My Heavenly Father created all things, and Mother Nature is simply our foolish way of trying to exclude him while we try to wrap our heads around His perfect system of nature, a system that is vainly trying to function in a broken world in a way that reminds us of how small we are. We see how all creation is groaning against the brokenness we now live in (Romans 8:20-22), never more than when the natural world causes destruction.