Calm in the Storm

I understand now what Charles Dickens might have meant when he writes, “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” That fictitious description fits my current state of affairs to a T. When people have asked me this past month how I’m doing, I don’t know how to answer. Should I tell them the part about how I’m discovering relational depths that I’d only ever dreamed of before? Or should I tell them instead about recently losing my teenage cousin to a tragic and unexpected end? Do I tell them that my wildest career ambitions are teetering on precipice of being actualized? Or do I tell them that I’m waiting to hear whether the one closest to me has cancer?

                There are times that life seems to move more quickly than I can keep up with it. The landscape of circumstances is sometimes shaped by careful planning, investing, and making little decisions that lead up to a well-determined course. And then there are those times that it’s more akin to a landslide—drastic change whether we ask for it or not. For me, I happen to be going through a landslide that even Fleetwood Mac couldn’t chronicle.

                Through all the uproarious clamor of a life swept away in the current, my heart has been thirsty to be alone in nature. It’s in this place that the litter of an overwhelmed mind is momentarily suspended, where God breaks in and lets silence seep into my skin. Where He has space to steady this tango between light and dark, hope and fear, life and death. Uncertainty may be my tagline, but in little pockets of quiet I find that uncertainty itself fades in significance. Uncertainty concerns the future. So does hope. But in these little durations of grace, tomorrow doesn’t matter yet. And yesterday has already been siezed from my grasp. The questions about what we could have done better don’t belong here. Nor do the worries about what is to come.

                When the enormity of life’s possibilities volleys us back and forth like a balloon in hurricane season, there is great wisdom in simply being. I often wonder what fuels the great leaders and innovators, especially considering that many people who have done the most noteworthy things in life have themselves undergone tremendous personal tragedy.   I tend to want to attribute it to a relentless workhorse ethic, but my own perfectionistic bent to burn the midnight oil no matter what has run me into enough dead ends to know that dogged determination alone isn’t enough. Greatness comes from perseverence, yes, but perseverence is fueled by a great vision. I don’t find my vision in attending to the maddening details of managing my life, just trying to keep my head above water. I find it in solitude. Where the mountains interpose the evening sky and remind me that God is bigger than all that. I find my vision in momentary abandon, the cessation of striving to control the tragic and the great alike. It’s in getting away from it all that God reminds me that being is more important than doing, that character carries us much further than circumstances. And in these moments my artist’s heart takes over, able to receive the intense reality of God’s hope and comfort. I am reminded that God’s heart for me is good, has always been good, and is gloriously consistent. This is the thing that cannot be taken away from me, the love that nothing can separate and that relies on the most unshakable of sources.

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