“If you want to be full of hope, you have to suffer a bit. You have to find purpose in the suffering so you don’t give up. You have to persevere. And when you persevere, your character, your proven faith and tried integrity, grows. And then hope. Hope arrives.”
If you are close to me, you might know that I recently read a book that changed my life. "Looking for Lovely" by Annie Downs.
In the first chapter, Annie talks about a thunderstorm. She’s flying from Atlanta to Dallas and she has the opportunity to watch this wicked storm from the perspective of an airplane. She describes the colors and the movement, and the way this massive piece of weather is shaping the land below it. She talks about it the same way someone would talk about a work of art. Yet if you were one of the people who was actually down there in that storm, it wouldn’t seem beautiful at all. With all the rain and hail and winds, on a day you probably happened to forget your umbrella. The kind of storm that is a masterpiece from above is the same kind of storm that ruins your entire day when you’re actually down there living in it.
New York City is a little bit like a storm to me. Truthfully, I have been having a rough time. When people ask me, I tell them that my trip is going well. Because fundamentally, technically, it is. Everything is going according to plan. But am I still having the time of my life? Not really. I have started running on autopilot. Days last forever, but the weeks fly by. I struggle to write because I struggle to find the pretty things in my everyday, so I don’t have anything to share. Sometimes it seems like the magic of this city has worn off, and I'm not dying to stay here anymore. I find myself daydreaming about how I’m going to decorate my new apartment in Athens when I get home. I get snapchats of my friends together and it makes me want to be where they are instead of alone in Manhattan. I call my parents multiple times a day, or not at all. It got to a point where I started to feel a little bit like I was drowning, and I had so been looking forward to going home for the 4th of July, just to escape the city for the short time that I did.
My flight out of New York that Friday night was the biggest nightmare of my life. When we finally got off the ground (six hours later than scheduled), I was dozing off to “Nervous” by Gavin James when I was woken up by a flash. I opened my eyes, and I saw God.
There, right outside my airplane window, was one of the most incredible things I’d ever seen. We were flying over a storm, and it was just like I had read about. It was nighttime, so the strange shades of grays and purples that Annie described in her chapter were indiscernible to me. But it was still so beautiful. This was more than just big clouds with some lighting. This storm was a creature; rolling, moving, undoubtedly disturbing and demanding the attention of anyone unfortunate enough to be below it. Streaks of lightning zig-zagged from left to right, from the top of the sky to the ground, illuminating it from within and revealing how truly massive it was. I watched for what must have been at least ten minutes, and it actually brought tears to my eyes.
I realized in that moment that I'm not as good at seeing the storms in my life as I am the storms from an airplane window. Things are not as easy as I anticipated here in New York. My plans have been altered by circumstances outside of my control. This storm in my life is making things difficult, and I've been suffering through it from here on ground rather than trying to look at it from the sky.
From where God is, every single storm in your life looks like a work of art. From where He is, the thing that's making your life difficult and the thing you're struggling to get through is something so beautiful and unique. The colors and the lights and the movement, they're unlike anything else in this world. And it may be the worst time of your life when you're down here experiencing it, but from up above, it's a masterpiece that's actively shaping you into the masterpiece He intended you to be.
Sometimes it takes a midnight thunderstorm at 39,000 feet to remind you that there is a bigger plan than your own. To remind you that the storms that make you wish for an easier way out, the storms that make you doubt yourself, and the storms that make you want to quit — even the storms that delay your flight for six hours — are all beautiful and serve a purpose. Without them, we cannot grow.
Whenever you find yourself in the middle of a storm, I hope you'll imagine what it looks like from an airplane. Because it makes dealing with it on the ground sting just a little less, and it is such a humbling experience to feel God actively working in your life.