Storms That Refresh

A meditation on change, bad weather and new light

Watching a storm roll in is truly quite remarkable. Last week, I emerged from my basement office to get some sunshine, and boy, was there a lot of it. I got so into the spirit of summer that I indulged in a 3 PM cold beer on the back porch, feet kicked up and shade on. A writer needs vitamin D, I’m told. Then my daughter told me that a band of storms was rolling in from the west, the direction I was facing, beer in hand. It looked gorgeous. Part of my personality is that of the Mayor of Amityville in Jaws. I scoffed and hand waved it away. Then I checked the radar. Sure enough, a big ol’ band of green and orange stretching north to south across Virginia. It had to be just minutes away.

Then I saw it. A faint bit of gray in the distance. Churning. Misting. Growling. The predominant blue in the sky never vanished all at once; I’m not even sure how it happened. At some point, it was just gone, like it had never been there at all.

Change is like that.

Usually, I’d go inside for shelter, but that day I felt called to sit through it. My imagination has been wandering and getting stuck on “storms” I percieve to be in the near future for damn near everyone. War coverage on the news. Political instability at a high not seen since the World Wars. Something, something Iran. I don’t know.

Just count me in the camp that believes dark times are not exclusively behind us. Do they ever stay relegated to history books? That would be ahistorical.

And so I sat. A cloud shelf appeared, dark and brooding. It was coming fast now, and the bright day had become tinted orange before leaping to a dark blue. The shelf had a black core, a dark heart, and it was getting closer.

Then it was overhead. BOOM! It snapped so incredibly loudly and sent the neighbor’s tarp flying into the air like a bird taking flight. It practically flapped its wings.

The first gust was like in the movies when scientists are watching a bomb test. My hair got knocked back, and my eyes widened. You could see the wind move across the grass and toward my castle like a wave.

Everything had changed. It had done so with incredible speed.

I was warned, but still, I doubted it. The Mayor speaketh.

What was on my phone radar app wasn’t what I was seeing, so I kind of wrote it off. Stupid weather apps.

Change is nature’s delight.

Yeah, Marcus Aurelius scribbled that down in what’s known as Meditations.

Sure, there are some things I’d like not to change. I’d like peace to continue between major world powers. I’d like my daughter not to grow a day older. I’d like the pleasant state of my marriage to freeze and never undergo strain or alteration. I would have liked the sun to stay out forever.

But God, do I love to smell of the grass and garden after a hard rain.

Everyone knows the smell. It’s sweet, wet, cool, but also warm. My moment was “ruined”…but I got to experience a wider range of life than the simple picture of good vibes.

In the Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, a demon wonders to one of his colleagues about whether or not World War II and a future war were in the best interests of their Infernal Majesty. War, of course, means violence and death and new souls for Hell. It’s a way to quickly feed the machine. But the other demon offers a note of caution, urging consideration of how war brings out the best in humanity alongside the worst.

This is a devastating whiff of truth. In peace, opulence, comfort, and stagnation, we devise all sorts of twisted ways to spend the time and increase the comfort to new levels. There are few culturally ubiquitous heroes of peacetime. There are few sacrifices in times of material comfort that are worth writing books about.

Screwtape and his fellow demon, Wormwood, decide on caution when using war as an instrument of darkness. It opens the door to too much light that they cannot control.

Is the weather not always more pleasant after a brutal storm of piercing winds and rain? I didn’t mention how humid and broiling it was on my fine sunny day, not after the storm. The air was clear.

“For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! ” - Peter 1:6-7