I should have known better, as I’ve been running for many years. Nevertheless, I planned a longer run even though the weather forecast looked ominous. Maybe I could beat the storm clouds, I thought to myself. I bet wrong. A few miles from home the winds began to blow and the skies opened up. As luck would have it, I was in a rural area with no place to seek shelter. Fortunately there was very little lightning; just torrential wind and rain.
As I was running in the heavy rains without an adequate place to seek shelter, I thought about the many times when I’ve latched onto something or somebody to protect me from the storms in my life. When we’re young, it’s usually our parents who shelter us from the storms of this world; but as time goes on, we begin to find other corners that make us feel safe. Sometimes we pick the right corners; other times we don’t.
My younger brother and I were born less than a year apart. We shared the same bedroom. We looked nearly identical; but the similarities ended there. Like many families, there was stress in our household growing up, and I didn’t always feel safe. Through the years, it occurred to me that the rootedness of my faith; the importance of prayer in my life could be traced to the many nights of pulling the covers up over my head asking God to make it better. And God did indeed answer my prayers on many occasions. Sadly however, my brother took a very different road; a road that led him to alcohol and drugs, and eventually to a very early death.
I’ve lived enough years to recognize that there will always be storms in our lives. All of us will eventually find ourselves caught in the midst of a raging storm from time-to-time. And in our humanness, there will always be a tendency for us to seek protection from those storms, leading us to make choices that can change the course of our lives. It’s in those choices that we can either seek to choose God … or something else.
Let’s pray about that.
And he said to them, "Why are you afraid, you of little faith?" Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a dead calm.Mt 8:26