What the Storm Can't Do

October 30

When I awoke this morning, I expected to be stumbling through the dark, to be feeling quite a chill, and to be drinking bottled water with my morning medicine. Instead, I am illumined by my little night lights, enjoying the designated temperature set on our thermostat, and sipping my warm cup of tea. The 'perfect storm' that is still hovering in our area, still howling outside the window, still pouring buckets-full of rain upon us has not curtailed our electric service! Far lesser storms have done that, but this one has been stayed by a mighty hand that has ordained we shall not be without necessary power through this onslaught.

That same hand touches our lives through other types of storms in life as well. In fact, the one thing this horrible storm has done is to awaken my awareness of the truth of His promise to be with His people through their storms. It is evident that Jesus Christ makes all the difference in the midst of the storm--and not only when He speaks, "Peace, be still." Sometimes, He doesn't stop the storm when we cry out, "Lord, don't You care that we perish!" as His disciples did when their little boat was threatened by the towering waves of the tumultuous sea. Sometimes He allows the storm to run its course and He calms His people.

He calms His people by giving them that inner "peace that passes understanding to keep their hearts and their minds in Him" when the storm around them continues to rage. When He gives inner peace in the midst of the storm, we gain an advantage that sunny skies cannot afford to us. When He gives inner peace in the midst of the storm, we begin to recognize the infinite power that is ours when we walk hand-in-hand with Him through our trials. We begin to recognize that there is a level of living and moving and having our being that transcends the calm moments of joy that we so covet and encompasses even the moments of helplessness in the face of a torrential onslaught that is beyond our ability to overcome on our own.

So we hold more tightly to the Lord in our trials and we seek His direction a little more fervently, for we know He is the key to riding out the storm, but we do not fear, for we begin to grasp the truth that was made manifestly clear to Job in his ordeal, "When He has tried me, I shall come forth as gold." We realize as that good man did that the trial is not for our destruction but to prove our faith, to strengthen our confidence in the One who sometimes allows us to reach the point of saying, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him." He wants us to reach that decision--to trust in spite of the storm--for that decision, of all the decisions we will ever make, brings us to the real point of power over the storms of life.

It is that decision, of all the decisions we will ever make, that brings us to the point of understanding what a storm--even a 'perfect monster storm of the millennium'--cannot do! It cannot rob us of His light in which He enables us to walk without fear of the darkness. It cannot rob us of the warmth of His love which is always with us. It cannot rob us of the refreshing of the living water that Jesus is to us.

It cannot rob YOU of these things because Jesus is with you through the storm. Because He is by your side, the storm--no matter its nature or its intensity--has no power over you.