You can see a storm a long way off from the cab of a truck.
Out on the flat stretches especially. The sky ahead goes dark, and then you see it coming down. It does not look like rain from that far away. It looks like fog, or like somebody took a paintbrush and dragged it straight down from the clouds to the ground. Long gray strokes, miles wide.
It is one of the most coolest things I have seen out here. It is also something you are about to drive into…
The wall
When you finally get to it, you almost literally hit it. One second the road is dry and the next it is like driving into a wall of water. You hear it before anything else. In a heavy storm it is loud, and it happens fast.
And most of the time, you just keep driving. You slow down, you keep your lane, you hold the wheel.
There is no telling how long it lasts. Some of them are done in a couple of minutes. Some of them go on and on, and you have no way of knowing from the front edge which kind you are looking at.
You can pull up the radar and get an idea. Where you are, where the edge of it is, how wide the whole thing runs. You can do your best to stay out of the worst of it, the dark red and the purple, by timing a break or taking an exit.
Sometimes that works. But storms take a turn. They do not always go the way they are supposed to go…
…Neither does life.
So a lot of the time you do not get a choice, and knowing where the edge is does not get you out of it. The only way to the other side is through it.
And eventually you do come out. Sometimes into sunlight. Sometimes just into clouds and no more rain. You look in the mirror and there it is, that same wall of water, sitting behind you now.
You did not wait for it to stop. You went through it.
“When you go through deep waters, I will be with you. When you go through rivers of difficulty, you will not drown. When you walk through the fire of oppression, you will not be burned up; the flames will not consume you.”
Isaiah 43:2
Notice what that verse does not say. It does not say if you go through deep waters. It says when. And it never once says the water goes away.
When the wipers cannot keep up
But every driver knows there is another kind.
Sometimes the rain comes down so hard that the wipers on high cannot keep up with it. You lose the road. You cannot see the lines, and the cars behind you that do not have their headlights on are virtually invisible in your mirrors.
The more you are carrying, the more that matters. A loaded truck takes a long time to get up to speed, and it takes even longer to stop. Carry enough and you cannot wait until the last second to decide.
That is not the time to push through. That is the time to slow it all the way down, be still, and ride it out until you can see enough to keep going.
The man who drives into every storm at full speed because he thinks that is what tough looks like is the same man who ends up in the ditch. Some storms you drive through. Some you wait out. Knowing which one you are in is most of the wisdom.
“Be still, and know that I am God!”
Psalm 46:10
Still back there
I posted a question a while back that I keep thinking about. Did the storm stop, or did you just finish driving through it?
Most of the time it is the second one. It is still back there. Somebody else is driving into it right now, and he cannot see the other side yet.
That is why I tell people what I came through.
If you are out on the road and could use a conversation with another believer, hit reply when you are parked. No pressure and nothing to join.