Aftermath

Proverbs 10:25  
When the storm has swept by, the wicked are gone, but the righteous stand firm forever.

I've been through a lot of storms in my life. In September 1989, I was a 10 year old boy who experienced a hurricane named Hugo. We were 200 miles inland and yet the storm maintained so much intensity that it knocked over trees and pounded our house with wind and rain for several hours. We were left with no running water or electricity for a week or two.

I remember standing in our downstairs closet when the wind was really bad. Thoughts of our roof coming off and having to endure this hurricane face to face ran through my young mind that night. That never happened, but just the thought of it terrified me.

When the sun dawned on the scene early the next morning we found shingles missing from our roof and branches of trees scattered across our yard. We discovered we were without power or running water and for the next couple weeks we lived a more simpler life, but we were fine. We just picked up the pieces of what the storm had done.

About a year later in the same house I remember it being a beautiful day, windy but absolutely gorgeous outside. I had been playing with my younger brother and had come in to the house for a break. I went upstairs where we had a sliding glass window in our dining room. I had come to get something to drink and something drew me to the window. As I looked out on our house's property I noticed a giant oak tree swaying in the wind back where our property line met our distant neighbor's heavily wooded forest. This grand oak swayed towards us and shook as if some invisible hand had grabbed its massive trunk to jostle it.

Suddenly out of no where this massive cloud came rolling over the tops of the trees and this 100 foot oak nearly bent over, along with every other tree around it. The wind was so strong and my mother yelled for me and my brother to run down stairs. I was mesmerized by everything going on and when I snapped out of my daze, I ran quickly to our basement. My mom tucked us away in our tiny closet located downstairs in the center of our house. I remember being so scared that my knees were knocking together uncontrollably.

And then just as quickly as this chaos began it stopped.

We ventured outside to see what had happened and to our surprise it wasn't much.  On the back side of our house leaves from the forest that nestled up to our property were scattered everywhere. To the front of our house a small dogwood tree had been uprooted and the cover to our well pump had been moved 200 yards away by the impressive wind storm we encountered. Shaken, but not harmed, we immediately began picking up the pieces of our yard.

Jump forward several years, I was a teenager and we had moved to a small town called China Grove. We moved there to live with my grandmother who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. We moved in to take care of her.

We were suppose to be leaving soon for a Vess family reunion, but soon for the Vess family meant that we were always at least two hours behind. My uncle had come by to pick up my grandmother earlier that day. My dad was yelling at my younger brother who was acting up exceptionally bad and for what ever reason, neither wanted to go to this reunion and especially did not want to get ready to leave.

The forecast called for scattered thunderstorms that day, but no one predicted what we saw.

Just about the time we were all finally ready and willing to leave it started to rain really hard. Then lightning and tremendously loud thunder kicked in. Then it began to get really strange. Suddenly the garage doors started to go up and down by themselves. Then it started to hail.

Now I had grown accustomed to seeing hail from time to time, and as it started to do so I noticed that there was an exceptional amount of it this time. You could hear the hail ping-ponging off our roof and it almost seemed soothing for sometime.

However, that did not last long. Out of no where it sounded like men were standing on our roof and hitting it with Louisville sluggers. We looked outside and the tiny marble sized hail balls had grown to become the size of golf balls.  Then it sounded like there was an exchange of the Louisville slugger for something with a little more weight, like say a sledge hammer. We looked out and there was softball sized hail pounding our yard and house.

We ran downstairs and brought our terrified dogs inside. My brother was about in tears and I was nervous, as well as my dad. My mother on the other hand was surprisingly excited as she began to shout, "Thank you Jesus! It's the end times, Jesus is coming soon!" To which we found more annoying than encouraging, as her yelling only frightened the dogs more and shook my nerves a little more to be perfectly honest.

The onslaught of this hail beating continued for several minutes.

The aftermath resulted in our minivan (that we had moved outside from the garage, because we were finally ready to go) being totally destroyed. Remember that scene at the end Michael Jackson's video Black or White where he turned into a panther, sashayed up to a car, turned back into a human, played with his zipper and then proceeded to beat the hell out of somebodies car with a baseball bat? Well, it was worse than that.  It looked like a whole army of people with baseball bats beat our poor minivan. The front and back windows were shattered and the roof was totally beaten in. It was incredible.

Tree limbs were down everywhere and not to mention softball to melon sized hail balls covered our yard and our neighbor's yard. I have a friend that said they actually had a hail log bust through their roof and land in their living room. We immediately went to work picking up the pieces of our car and house and trying to clean up what we could.

The truth is that storms will always come whether you think you are good or you know you are bad. You never feel like you deserve them and you find yourself feeling small and vulnerable in the midst of them.  And, if you're strong enough, you find yourself picking up the pieces from the aftermath of a storm. So long as you still have a foundation to build on, you rebuild. Or if your house was strong enough to endure the winds, rain and hail of whatever category storm you faced, then you simply repair the damage.  The test is not the fact that you experienced a storm, but rather the test is what you do after the experience. Did the experience wash you out? Did it move you on? Even still, did you learn from it? Did it change you, refine you, purge you? Or are you still the same? I'm speaking more figuratively than literally.

To remain unfazed is wonderful if you truly believe that you were perfect to begin with, but who really is? I believe that any storm you face in life can shake you and even crush you, but does that define you? No, its not the storm that defines who I am, the storm is only there to refine me. To chisel away the rough edges and smooth out the unrefined characteristics. Its the storms in life that push me from point A to point B or redirect me from taking point C. Either way storms come and they happen to everybody. However, its in the aftermath that you can discover new things about yourself.

Its in the rebuilding that you can remodel and reinforce yourself. Truth is, a storm will either make you stronger or weaker depending on your reaction.