The Other Side

I dis­tinctly remem­ber one of the last Mid­west thun­der­storms I got to expe­ri­ence. It was a typ­i­cal hot and humid sum­mer day in August of 2006. I had just got­ten mar­ried here in Cal­i­for­nia and we had made a trip home to have a recep­tion with all my friends and fam­ily who couldn’t make it to the wed­ding. It was like any good thun­der­storm, it blew in as quickly as it blew out. I, myself, would have loved it to stick around a lit­tle longer. I love me a good thunderstorm!

We were hang­ing out on my mom’s porch while I played with my nieces and nephews. We could see the blue skies begin to turn darker and darker as the clouds began to roll in. Every­thing got quiet and there was a deep calm that filled the air. As quickly as the silence came over the land, the skies broke open and the rain began to fall. The light­en­ing flashed and you could feel the vibra­tion of the rum­bling thun­der that fol­lowed. I love the power of a thun­der­storm, the beauty of it’s strength and might. The great thing about the thun­der­storms is that they leave a cool­ness to the air which is refresh­ing on a hot sum­mer day and they are often fol­lowed up with a beau­ti­ful burst of sun and if you’re lucky a nice rainbow.

I got to think­ing about this today because I’ve been watch­ing the rain fall all day. The skies in Cal­i­for­nia, at least in my part of Cal­i­for­nia, are a bit calmer. We are cur­rently in our rainy sea­son and the clouds are a cool gray tone and there is a slow and steady flow to the rain drops. The rain storms here typ­i­cally linger; they tend to come and hang out for days.

As I thought about the dif­fer­ences between these two storms — quick and pow­er­ful vs. slow and steady — it made me think how sim­i­lar they are to the storms of life. Some storms in life come through pow­er­fully wreak­ing havoc on any­thing that comes within it’s path. At the same time, there are those storms in life that keep a slow and steady pres­ence in your life. I’m cur­rently in one of the slow and steady storms. It’s not strong enough to knock down any trees or dis­able any elec­tric­ity, but it is just enough to keep me uncom­fort­able when I step out­side my door. What gives me hope is what lies on the other side of any storm, and that, my friends, is new growth.

.