Stronger than a Hurricane

Even Eggs, our tabby cat, needed reassurance Monday morning. As I sipped coffee and watched the rain fall outside our large kitchen widow, she walked in a figure eight around my legs—an unusually tender move on her part.

Having been glued to the weather for days, I understood her unease. Days before a tropical storm warning extended throughout my entire state, I felt an urgency—a need to react, to be prepared.

I also felt a call to arms. And as a result, I posted a short FB live video Sunday afternoon, essentially calling on God’s people to praise and worship Him in the storm.

As a visual learner, I kept picturing that the power that raised Jesus from the dead is greater than the destructive force that was wreaking havoc in places we once called paradise. And I wanted us to act on that idea together. I wanted a host of God’s people to praise Him in the storm instead of cowering in fear.

Because I truly believe something crazy happens when faith overcomes fear.

But since we only have video proof of the hurricane’s force, it’s hard to believe that God's power extends far and beyond 160 + mph winds. In fact, it’s easy to ask, “If God is all powerful, why doesn’t He just stop the carnage before it happens?”

While I could spend a long while trying to answer that question, the point I want to make is that if we’re not careful, the constant barrage of suffering in this world will hammer our psyches into apathy and unbelief. The storms will seem too big. The bad guys too evil. The loss, sickness, pain, and sheer hunger, too overwhelming.

But Jesus overcame the deepest place of destruction. He took the heavy weight of all our suffering and sin to the cross, died there in our place, and then broke free of the stranglehold of death on resurrection Sunday.

But that story will turn rote if we lose our ability to imagine the sheer scope of it.

He took on all of our sin. All of our suffering. All that separates us from what is pure and holy and true.

Talk about a hurricane, or an explosion of love.

A friend recently shared that while in church on Sunday, they suddenly couldn’t speak or sing due to an overflow of tears. A highly intelligent person, the former skeptic was undone by an emotion not their own. Moved to an unfamiliar place of brokenness, this person is still sorting out what happened.

Juxtapose that with another recent conversation I had with an avowed atheist, who refuses to believe in God without scientific evidence, and I ask, “How do you scientifically prove what happened to my other friend in church? How do you explain a tsunami of the heart?”

Which then makes me wonder how our faith God would grow if we could see the amount of breakthrough that goes on in all of our souls due to the power of the Holy Spirit.

Yes, there is evil. Yes, there is great suffering. But the power that raised Jesus from the dead far surpasses it all.

He is working in your life and mine.

Now… to walk on in faith.