February 27

Day 260: Carried Us Through the Storm

Today is a wet mess. Rain, snow, back to rain, back to snow, throw in some wind, and blend until smooth (?) It seems as if every day comes with a new "winter storm warning."

Maybe a metaphor for life. We obsess over what may be around the corner, down the road. We fear the unplanned, the unwanted.

We worry about what is not yet. And we try to control both our present circumstances and our future unknowns. All as a personal mitigation plan; a pain-avoidance strategy.

It has me thinking today. If I'm still breathing, if you're awake and living, we've somehow survived the prior storms. If we have a pulse, then none of us are totally paralyzed by our past. Affected yes, impacted for sure, but not totally done in.

A memory came flooding back to me of a particularly brutal one-way exchange years ago. He thought himself to be my friend. He thought I needed to hear his opinion of my role and work, his measure of my success. He wasn't, and I didn't. His paradigm was/is quite different from my own.

And I survived, fully intact, while in a room full of people. Sure, pastors sign on to take shots from others on occasion. It's somewhere written in the job description. But all of us take shots from time to time. Pastors are not unique in this.

We all survive, whatever the storms, to the extent Jesus wants us to survive. Live to fight another day, as it were. Maybe it includes a lingering "thorn in the side." Maybe not. Just lessons learned through hard experiences.

As I've mentioned before, there is something about Saturdays, especially stormy Saturdays that leads me to quiet reflection. My reflection found me looking for the address of a short passage that the Holy Spirit has assigned to be my verse for the day.

Psalm 77 ends with, "The clouds poured out water; the skies gave forth thunder; your arrows flashed on every side. The crash of your thunder was in the whirlwind; your lightnings lighted up the world; the earth trembled and shook."

Apart from the fact we don't usually get thunder and lightning here in SE Alaska, it does otherwise describe our weather today. But the psalm doesn't end with a weather report. Good thing.

"Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters." The people who first read this psalm were afraid of the sea. Deep waters were their metaphor for all things evil.

But the first readers would see this statement as describing how God had seen the writer through his troubles. He was continuing on as a carbon life form, still with a pulse.

But it's this last little bit that encourages and inspires. "...yet your footprints were unseen."

I do not know everything Jesus has done on my behalf to see me through my own prior troubles. I don't understand the many nuances of His work in my life. I don't know how, or even the why sometimes. But I do know He's done it, none the less. Every time.

It may be Jesus sends dark weather our direction so we can each be reminded. Reminded of how He has seen us through prior storms, and He will do so again.

And more likely in a way where His footprints will be unseen. While our own footprints were never footprints. Because He carried us through the storm.