God of the storm

This past weekend, a group of friends and I traveled to Crystal River for a Scalloping expedition. It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, the winds were calm, and we were thrilled to be out on the water with snorkel gear and scalloping nets in hand. About midway through the day, however, dark clouds rolled in, and as we were out in the water the waves began to pick up, and we were suddenly much farther from the boat than when we had plunged in. I consider myself a fairly strong swimmer, but no matter how hard I kicked, I could not close the gap between me and the boat. 

To say I was nervous was an understatement. The last time I went scalloping, our boat was caught in a very serious storm that almost caused us to wreck on an island. Come to think of it, maybe scalloping isn’t the hobby for me. In any case, I found myself farther and farther adrift from the boat, but what was so frustrating to me is that the Captain didn’t seem to be doing anything about the fact that his charges were scattered about the radius of his boat, just bobbing around in the lightning storm. So I kept swimming.

Finally, I noticed the Captain pull up his anchor and start making his rounds to scoop us up. Calm as can be, he asked each of us as we clambered back on the boat how many scallops we had picked up - like it was no big deal we had all almost drowned! But as I calmed down, I looked out over the bow of the boat, and I realized the waves that looked so terrifying to me while I was in the water, were pretty mundane when seen from the safety of the boat. Through the eyes of an experienced Captain, the storm was nothing to worry about. 

So often, in the midst of the storms of our lives, all we can do is fear the waves. We struggle against the current, trying desperately to escape an inescapable situation. We cry out to God and ask why our Savior is not saving us. We are unable to see the storm for what it is - a small gall in the midst of the ever changing weather of our lives. But God sees. God knows intimately our joys as well as our despair. We believe that Jesus experienced the depth and breadth of all our suffering, and He knows the gravity of the storm better than we do because He has the privilege of a Bird’s Eye View and an omnipresence transcending time and space. As we are caught in this seemingly endless point of time in our lives, we would do well to remember that eternity is but a breath, and this moment - this horrific, agonizing, terrifying moment - will be as nothing against the glory of God and our union with the Divine. 

What you are experiencing right now is real and it is deep and it is true. Sometimes we feel that our God is ignoring our pleas, and we wonder if we can trust a Divine who calmly watches us from the safety of the boat. But our God is not a hands-off God. Our God is there in the midst of the storm, captaining the ship, calmly knowing that we are going to weather the storm just fine. And as we finally ascend onto the boat, we will see clearly and no longer through a glass, darkly (1 Cor 13). We will look back over the waves of our lives, some big and some small, and know truly that we were held all along, never alone, never abandoned, never forgotten. We just have to keep on swimming.