God’s Hurricane

I’ve never been in a hurricane, but my wife grew up in South Florida so she knows the story well. I understand the science of them though. Here’s a short lesson: the edges are not as bad, then as you get “deeper” into the storm it gets worse and worse. And then right in the middle is the eye. My wife tells me that she remembers everything going calm when the eye passed over. It was calm in the middle of the storm.

My walk in recovery is often that same hurricane. I wander around and feel the rush of the wind. I ignore the breeze, then it builds to a gale. The sprinkles become rain drops. The drops grow into driving sheets of water that begin to flood my world. The wind rips my life apart and strews my broken wreckage hither and yon. For a long time now I’ve been the idiot clinging to a tree. I’ve been the fool sitting on the roof watching the water rise. I’ve been “weathering the storm.” Notice the nouns: idiot, fool, storm.

Good news! I have found the eye in the storm. God has me in the eye! The eye has peace. The eye has calm. The eye gives rest. It’s wonderful! But that isn’t the end of the story. I now have a choice: I can sit down and rest in the eye and just wait until the wrath returns on the other side of the eye. Yes, that’s certainly one of my options.

Instead I am choosing to run in the eye. I choose to go the direction that God takes that eye and stay right there smack-dab in the middle of all that peace and beauty. If God goes right, Paul goes right. If God goes left, you guessed it, Paul goes left. And when I feel those winds coming back that is my warning that I am drifting from the eye. Will I sit or will I run? I think I will..

–Rise Up!!