Have you ever experienced a storm?
This may be a silly question seeing as you are Minnesotans! But one of my most memorable was when I was visiting Minnesota before I moved here. My foster child was with me, and he had grown up in California where thunder storms were rare. We were staying at my friends lake cabin, and the two of us were sleeping in the bunk house…. An old building with shutters and screens for windows divided into two rooms by a three quarter wall partition. We had gone to bed and Riley was fast asleep when the rain began falling on my head. It was about 2 am, dark and humid with that feel in the air you get right before a thunderstorm. I got up and went outside to close the heavy wooden shutters to stop the rain coming in, and soon a huge thunderstorm was overhead, thunder shaking the bunkhouse. Riley woke up scared and came into my side of the wall, crying and feeling unsafe. So we ran through the rain to the main cabin and went and sat on the screened porch. He snuggled on my lap, wrapped in a blanket, and we watched and listened; the thunder rolling around the clouds, the lightening illuminating the sky. It was one of those storms where the lightening was just hanging out in the clouds, almost non stop, the rumble of the thunder nearly continuous with several loud claps that shook us to our cores. And soon Riley had moved from fear into wonder at the sight, now safely wrapped and held and in awe at the immensity of the storm. I think this is an image for us for life. The storms rage around us, but if we are held in safety, we can face them, see them for what they truly are, wait them out, and even see the wonder they bring. Those on the boat with Jesus that night forgot this. They just wanted the storm to be gone. They were not able to see Jesus, asleep on the boat with them and know they were safe. Instead they woke him up and demanded he make the storm stop. And Jesus, being Jesus, did. He saw their heightened, agitated state, and knew he would not be able to teach them anything until they had calmed down, and so he said, to the people as much as the waves, Peace. Be still.” And it always amuses me when I read this that the disciples with him immediately see the way he has calmed the outer conditions, but miss how he calms them too! But this is so often reflective of us too. We enter into a storm, bidden or unbidden, and we want it to stop. We want someone to wave the magic wand of calmness over the waves that are swamping us. We look to the outside for the solution instead of looking within us for the strength we have to make it through, the solutions we know deep inside, the wisdom we have, if only we can make it past the fear of the storm to listen. We want to wake up Jesus and have him speak the words to the powers that are engulfing us. And yet, God doesn’t take away the storm. God, though, also does not make the storms in my theology. God doesn’t send bad thing to us to test us or to teach us a lesson. God doesn’t send down punishment upon us or even allow bad things to happen so we will grow. God does not make the storms in our lives….And God does not take the storms away. But what I know for sure is that God is with us in the midst of each and every storm. Standing by us. Suffering with us. Tossed about in the waves with us until the storm passes and beyond. Sometimes I wish this story in the Bible were different. That Jesus did not just make the storm stop, but, instead, taught his disciples how to live through the storm, how to navigate it with strength and stamina and accompany them each step of the way. Instead of chastising them and saying, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” I would have liked him to say, “I see you are afraid. But here, let’s ride it out together.” Instead of shaming them for their fear, to recognize it and walk them to a place of calmness and awe. For it is stories like this that can cause us to hurt one another when someone is going through a storm in their life, or has emerged from one and is healing. If Jesus can make statements that shame, then we can too. When we say to someone who is struggling, “Why do you feel this way?”, then we are not really honoring their feelings. We shut down their responses and can cause them to retreat with their fears rather than helping them see they are being supported through whatever they are facing. When we tell them that God is teaching them a lesson through their own, personal storm we are implying that God sent it to them to teach them something rather than listening to how the storm is affecting them and staying with them in their pain, walking with them until they are calm once more. After Hurricane Katrina, I went to New Orleans for a semester as part of my internship during seminary. I stayed at a community center in a United Methodist Church right in the French Quarter. The community center had been serving kids from the neighborhood before the storm, but now only had one program up and running… a huge difference from the 200 kids they had served each day before. They could not get the staff and volunteers and many of the children and youth had been forced to relocate. But Coach Parker was in town, and about a dozen teen girls showed up three times a week for homework help, fun, dancing, food and mentoring. I joined them most days I was there and not working with a rebuilding team, and got to know some of their stories. Most of these young women had been in Coach Parkers' program before the storm, but one had been too young, and really was still too young officially, but she was the sister of another young woman, and so came. She was 11 years old, a quiet and shy girl, but when you coaxed a rare smile from her it lit up the room. The young women were learning a dance routine to offer their parents at the end of year dinner they were going to give. They had chosen the song, I Need You To Survive, which has the lyrics: I need you, you need me. We're all a part of one body. Stand with me, agree with me. We're all a part of God's body. I pray for you , you pray for me. I love you, I need you to survive. I won't harm you with words from my mouth. I love you, I need you to survive. and the dance told the story of their journey through the storm of coming together and needing one another to heal. But this young woman, whom we will call Tanisha, was not joining them. She watched intently, but refused to get up and dance, even when the others were encouraging her to. One day I sat down with her as the others were dancing and asked what she needed to feel ok to dance. “A different body,” she answered quietly. We chatted some more and I asked some gentle questions to try to figure out why she thought a different body would be the answer, and eventually said something like, “What’s wrong with this body?” It was as though the floodgates opened as she shared her story…. The other girls had moved on to something else and she was free to speak privately. She told me that after the storm they had lost their home and had gone to stay with some relatives she had never met before in Texas. While they were there, having lost everything including some pets, she was scared and sad, but trying to not let her mom know because her mom was so stressed out. An older cousin, a twenty something year old man, had begun to pay attention to her, starting off by buying her stuffed animals and chocolate and and giving her hugs, but soon he had moved on to commenting in her body and then to molesting her. She told her sister who told her mom who moved them back to New Orleans as soon as she could…. But not before the damage had been done. Now Tanisha just wanted a new body that had not been molested, she wanted a new body that had not been called beautiful and then abused, she wanted a new body that had not been shamed, she wanted a body that was not scared and scarred. As I sat with her, I knew there was no taking away the storms she had lived through, the hurricane, the losses, the move, the molesting… those storms had come and gone. And God had not taken them away (although, thankfully Tanisha had been heard and believed and moved home from Texas). Now Tanisha needed to have those inner strengths and power drawn out again so she could stay in this body and heal and grow. She needed a community to stand with her and walk her back to health. So we talked, over time, about what it meant that this was still the body she had…. One that something bad had happened to. That this body would always be the body she had. That many of us had bodies that had been hurt by others, that had lived through storms… both natural disaster storms and human made ones. But that these bodies were our bodies, the only ones we got for our lifetime! And how they are powerful and strong bodies. And how we are all a part of God’s body and need one another to survive. Coach Parker worked with her too, and the girls, who all knew her story, were encouraging and kind and gentle with her, for many of them had experienced similar things. The last couple of weeks before the dinner I had teams there that I was working with and did not get to spend time with the mentoring program. I would stick my head in to say hi, but that was about it. On the night of the dinner the girls were excited. We had ordered shrimp po boys and pizza and the girls had made a salad and cookies, and we gathered and ate together with their families. Then the girls asked their parents to join them in the sanctuary for a performance. The adults all wandered over and the girls began to share their stories of gratitude and what program had meant to them as they were back in New Orleans. Stories of being cramped in one bedroom trailers with 5 or 6 siblings, or schools being different and hard, of having no where else they could study in peace, or these friends being their lifelines when the rest of their lives were so disrupted. Then they danced. To my surprise and joy, Tanisha was right there in the middle dancing with the rest of them. She looked radiant, and as though she were proud that this body were her body! And after the performance she ran over and gave me a big hug before heading off with the others to party some more. God doesn’t take away the storms. And neither can we. But we can stand with one another through them. We can be community together until the one who has been hurt can stand and dance once more. We can be lifelines for one another. As we continue to find our way out of the storm of the last year, I invite you to look back over it…. From March 2019 or so to now. Where did you experience God? How did someone show up for you? Who stood by you and with you to walk with you to now, to give you the strength to dance, to hold you, to wraping a blanket until your fears subsided and you could look and see what was true? Who did you do this for? What or who else do you need as things calm down from the height of the storm? Share with someone close to you one or two words that come to you about the storm that was CoVid. I need you, you need me. We're all a part of God's body. Stand with me, agree with me. We're all a part of God's body. I pray for you, you pray for me. I love you, I need you to survive. I won't harm you with words from my mouth. I love you, I need you to survive. God does not take away the storms. But God is there, in God’s full self, sensed by us in nature, in other people showing up, in perseverance and hope and small acts of love and kindness, in songs and dance and art, in laughter and tears and someone to listen. God does not take away the storms, but God is with us each and every step of the way. A lifeline to hope and healing. Thanks be to God!
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