Learning to Weather the Storms of Life

Written by Carol Smith

Alison Richmond knows just how quickly a storm can hit and just how
much devastation it can cause. She was a seminary student living in New
Orleans when Hurricane Katrina flooded the city. She left New Orleans
for Baton Rouge, La. While there – through extensive, ongoing volunteer
work in an evacuee shelter – she witnessed the ongoing effects in the
lives of those who’d been living along the Gulf Coast.

“A general sense of disbelief really hovered over the entire region
for several weeks,” Richmond says. “Everyone knew it was true, but it
was so far beyond anything anybody had ever experienced before. It’s
insane to try to reconcile the fact that the place where you live,
where you get your groceries, where you drive, the park you go to, your
coffee shop – all are underwater. It took weeks to really get your mind
around it.”

There’s More Than One Kind of Storm

Earlier, in North Carolina, the storm Rene (REE-nee) Dodd faced didn’t
move from a tropical depression to a tropical storm to a hurricane.
Instead, it moved from surgery to chemotherapy to radiation. When Rene
first learned of her breast cancer, she says, “I went into the ‘here’s
what we’re going to do’ mode.”

The storms of life – no matter what they are – blindside us. Our
first response is survival mode, and then we try to wrap our minds
around what has happened and the way our lives have changed. And
somewhere in the process, we have to find our way back to what we
thought we called our own – our place in the world, our routine, our
sense of normalcy. Hurricane or heartbreak, isn’t the process the same?

It’s a difficult truth to swallow. In our understanding of His
sovereignty, we see God as someone who has the power to make our lives
easier. But the storms of life reveal that God, who is about far more
than just making our lives easier, does allow tragedy. This can be
tough to accept – especially when our hearts are crying, “I don’t
understand. Why did God allow this to happen?”

Life Isn’t Always Fair

The mystery of faith is that even while we grapple with God’s role in
it all, He is still our source of refuge within every circumstance.
“When I realized how bad everything was,” Richmond shares, “the Lord
met me with some verses in Psalms that shaped how I viewed everything:
‘God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains
fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the
mountains quake with their surging’ (Psalm 46:1-3). The hurricane
happened to us all. It’s part of the destruction of a fallen world. The
rain falls on the just and the unjust.”

Richmond makes reference to the Book of Job, in which the
quintessential suffering soul spoke those words in response to a wife
so distraught by tragedy that she encouraged him to “curse God and
die!” Job asked, “Should we accept only good from God and not
adversity?” (Job 2:9-10).

In his book “Rumors of Another World,” Philip Yancey adds, “No one
gets an exemption from hardship on planet Earth. … The Bible never
minimizes hardship or unfairness – witness books like Job, Psalms, and
Lamentations. It simply asks us to withhold final judgment until all
the evidence is in.”

Of course, that withholding can be the toughest task. We want to
make sense of it, to understand, to reason why. Sitting with God in the
midst of adversity is a test of faith.

“Tragedies,” Richmond notes, “don’t affect the way you act as much
as they affect the way you think. It’ll forever be a chronological
marker for my life. … The hurricane was a magnifier for everything. Who
you really are came out. What your foundation really is became evident.”

What Are You Building On?

In Matthew’s Gospel account, Jesus told the story of a man who built
his house on a rock. When the storms came, this man’s house stood,
while another house that had been built on sand was leveled. These
houses could have been constructed exactly the same above the
foundation. They could have looked identical – even had the best storm
windows money could buy. But it’s what they were built on that made the
difference. So it is with this life: Adversity reveals what we’re built
on.

There’s nothing wrong with loving the lives we’ve created – our
relationships, work, accomplishments, belongings, activities, and
rhythms. It would be something other than human not to be affected by
the loss of “life as we know it.” But if our sense of well-being is
completely based on things that can be flattened by calamity, then
we’ve set ourselves up to be knocked down when the winds blow.

On the other hand, we can build our lives on solid unchangeables:
faith that God is present, that He’ll ultimately make sense of life,
that He has the power to rebuild us from any devastation. These are the
belowground foundations that remain even when everything else is
reduced to rubble.

“I definitely have learned what’s important in life,” Dodd admits.
“My priorities have changed. I look at everything with a more
big-picture point of view. In the big scheme of things, does this
matter? Will it even matter tomorrow?

“It [cancer] has brought me closer to God. I feel more dependent on
Him,” Dodd adds. “This was part of my life’s journey, and wherever I
was or am during this journey, I’m never alone.”

The Important Stuff

What does it take to get through the storm and let it take you deeper
in life? Yancey says it’s trust: “‘Do not be afraid’ is the most
frequent command in the Bible. … Trust does not eliminate the bad
things that may happen. Trust simply finds a new outlet for anxiety and
a new grounding for confidence: God.

“Paul wrote, ‘And the peace of God, which transcends all
understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus,’”
Yancey continues. “When I question the practicality of those words in
view of all the terrible things that have happened … I remind myself
that Paul wrote them from a Roman prison cell.”

When we lose what we consider to be the essentials of our lives,
these truths may not feel like enough. It takes time for storms to pass
until we get our breath and take account of what we’re left with. We
have to be patient with ourselves and give God room to heal us with the
kind of refuge only He can provide. Then, somehow, we’ll move from
“It’s not enough” to “It’s all I’ve got” to “It’s what really matters.”

Lives – like cities – can be rebuilt. People do rise to the
challenge. Engaging with God through faith does make all the
difference, even if it doesn’t make life easy. It’s knowing that storms
come and go, while God’s presence stays constant, guiding us to some
kind of restoration when the winds die down.

In the words of Richmond, “In a lot of ways, it [disaster] cleans up
your life for you. Only the most important stuff matters, and
everything else is gone and forgotten.”

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