To The One Going Through a Storm

The other day I was running a couple of errands and decided that the clouds to the west looked way too dark for me to be running around any longer and risk driving through any sort of bad storm that was coming. 

So I was on my way home, feeling a little frustrated because I wanted to get my groceries and finish my errands, when a few raindrops started hitting my car. A flash of lightning struck right in front of me, and it just started down-pouring. Like a monsoon downpour.

It got kind of scary, because I couldn’t see the people in front of me. I could barely see the taillights of their car ahead. So I decided to go ahead and pull over… 

And I think this is just such a great illustration of how sometimes we can get caught up in storms in life. And it’s frustrating because it’s never on the timetable that is convenient or ideal. Sometimes storms pop up when we’re trying to accomplish a goal or when we’re trying to do something good, and we don’t really understand why a storm popped up in the first place.

So as I sat in my car on the side of the road, I called Tyler, just a little bit afraid. I was being blown all over the road, and I was just envisioning a tornado sucking up my vehicle. Because that’s what storms do: they can cause us to make up worse scenarios in our heads than what is happening in reality.

But we have to switch our focus.

We can’t be focused on fear. When I was in the middle of that storm and decided to get back on the road, I had to focus. My hands were at 10 and 2. My eyes were peeled. And all I was focused on was the task at hand. 

I wasn’t worried about tomorrow. I wasn’t worried about what was going to happen next week. I didn’t worry about what we were going to have for supper like I was before when I realized I wasn’t going to get my grocery shopping in.

Instead, I was focused. And sometimes that’s what storms do, as bad as they may seem. They make us grateful for what we do have. They bring us back to what matters.

Sometimes we can think that God is bad because He allows the storms to happen. But sometimes it’s the storms that bring us to where we need to be.

Don’t get stuck looking back.

I realized that behind me where I had come from, there were blue skies. It looked so nice and beautiful and peaceful, but that’s not where I was headed. I was heading the opposite direction. And sometimes when we get stuck in storms, even in minor storms in life, we can get caught up into looking in the rearview mirror at the blue skies behind us, trapping ourselves into thinking that our best days were yesterday. Or thinking if only we could go back to this time, before the storm, when things made better sense, then everything would be alright.

And although I knew that blue skies were behind me, I also knew that blue skies awaited me ahead. And sometimes in life we have to truck through things and go through storms that don’t maybe make sense, that are kind of uncomfortable, that maybe have us feeling a little fearful or afraid, but there is purpose in them. And there are blue skies at the end of them.

It’s who we know.

We have to remember that it’s not always what we know in times of a storm. All the weather forecasting knowledge and all the driving knowledge in the world can sometimes not prepare us for a storm such as the one I was driving through.

But I knew who I could call on and who I could rely on. So I prayed. It was important for me to have that hope, turning to the One who I knew was listening and who was there.

You have to walk THROUGH it.

There was no denying that I had to go through this storm to get home. I couldn’t go around it. I couldn’t go below it. I couldn’t go above it. I had to go through it. And it reminded me of a similar story in the Bible. 

It reminded me of the time the disciples were on a ship that was being tossed at sea from a storm while Jesus was sleeping and how they were freaking out and trying to figure everything out, and didn’t understand why. Then they simply called upon Jesus, He woke up, and the storm calmed. 

The point is that the disciples still had to endure the storm. Just because Jesus was there didn’t mean that they were exempt from all storms in life. They had to sit there on that boat and feel the winds and the waves. They had to sit there even with Jesus in the boat and endure a storm. 

Storms reveal God’s wonders.

His miraculous wonders, His beauty, His majesty, His grace, it was exemplified through that storm. And it doesn’t always make sense. And it’s not always pretty. And sometimes there’s pain, and there’s loss, and there’s hardship. But we don’t know the big picture. We don’t know the purpose behind any and every situation.

So we have to trust through every single storm that He who has started a good work in you will carry it out to completion and that He is working all things for good, whether or not it feels like it in this stormy season right now. 

Mark 4:39 “And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.”

Let Him do the same for you.