Originally posted on Facebook HERE
Strange morning. Woke up because of the storm. Thunder, maybe lightening, wind, rain hitting the windows. I’ve never liked storms. They’ve always kinda scared me. Certainly make me extremely uneasy. So I stayed in bed until I heard it pass with my head covered by pillows, which is why I wasn’t sure about the lightening. But I heard the thunder, wind and rain just fine. Before I was born, I had a brother ho was hit by lightening on a golf course and killed when he was 14 years old. That was a couple years before I was born, so I never knew him, but I kinda always remember knowing that story. Dad had his picture on his bedroom wall to the day he died. I always wondered if knowing that made me more uneasy around storms than I would have been without knowing it. I guess I’ll never know the answer to that – but I don’t like storms. I had no idea we were getting a storm last night. I don’t really watch the weather (weatherman are about 50/50 on what they predict anyway), so… that storm came as a surprise to me. Sometimes you know they’re coming and you can prepare a bit, often those are the really big, scary storms – but knowing it’s coming almost makes it worse. All that anxiety. And there will be storms. Last night won’t be my last (well, hopefully it won’t – tomorrow is guaranteed to no one). Our daily lives work like this, too. We all encounter storms along the way in living our day to day lives. Relationships get choppy, our work situations can change, we can injure ourselves physically – now we have a virus to contend with on top of everything else. Ever get that feeling when things are just sailing along great that something bad just has to happen soon? Weird, right? Like, we can’t just sail through life without problems. So we start to expect them, even when there are none on the horizon. Some people seem addicted to storms in their personal lives – like they can’t be happy unless there’s a situation going on, so there’s always a situation going on. That’s not me. I’d be fine just living a problem free lifestyle. Not a fan of physical or personal storms – but eventually they all pass. And often, once they do and we’re on the other side of it we can see how we’ve grown by having gone through it. Storms force us to “feel the fear and do it anyway”. And if we can just learn to be calm, to know God, to feel the peace within our hearts that we get through prayer and meditation, maybe – just maybe – things won’t be as scary the next time we have to deal with something. And we can learn to enjoy the moments of our lives no matter what emotion we’re going through – love, pain, fear, happiness… feel it all. Breathe it in. Once the storms are over, there’s that super cool period where you can still smell the rain, the birds come out, the sun starts to shine, and sometimes you even get a rainbow… you’d never get all that without the storm that preceded it. Storms lead to growth.
