Note: On Tuesdays and some Sundays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.
It is so easy to trust and believe when you wake up and find this, accompanied by singing birds. You can almost taste God in the breeze, the dissipating fog, the gentle sunshine. It’s all good, just like Him.
Storms are different, no matter how many we’ve survived. Consider the disciples in Matthew 8:23-27. All were adults; many had worked or lived by the sea all their lives. Surely, there’d been storms before. They’d survived them, though they likely knew people who had. And yet, in today’s Gospel reading, they fall apart. They have to wake up Jesus and beg Him for a sort of salvation. He provides it, with a bit of a rebuke for their lack of faith.
Lot’s wife suffered even more greatly for a lack of faith. Did she look back with tears and sadness for lost friends? Did she look back to see just how bad the destruction was? We don’t know, but we know the price she paid.
God’s in those peaceful, beautiful moments in our lives. He’s also with us in the ones that scare us and hurt us physically and threaten to rip out our hearts and even our souls. When we surrender our fears and keep our eyes on him, confident in His mercy, we will find it… and great calm, even in the midst of the storm.
