Hurricane Winds
One afternoon last winter, I was waiting at the deli counter of the local Jewel, when two young adults began lamenting the state of geo-politics and geo-weather. In a short span, they went from some basic concerns about our democracy and global warming to conclusive statements about why they would never have children and the imminent end of the world. It got pretty heavy pretty fast.
That conversation has haunted me in the intervening months. It’s been a helpful touchpoint for this middle-aged man to try to understand what’s going on inside the minds and hearts of our young adults. There’s a lot of anxiety and genuine despair for humanity’s future. I view these forces as the hurricane winds of the soul. To mitigate against the potential damage of these soul winds, I try to organize my own personal thoughts and observations into three categories:
Reality
Causality
Anti-anxiety
Here’s what I mean by each:
Reality: When it comes to the weather, recent hurricanes and rainy deluges have caused chaos from Florida to North Carolina. Mercy! The 2022 hurricane season alone (Ian) is thought to have caused more than $117 billion in property damage and this year’s season (Helene, Milton) is on track to surpass that total. And the property damage pales in comparison to the human costs. That’s a genuine cause for concern.
Causality: Hurricane season has been an annual occurrence in our part of the world for thousands of years, since the last ice age. Therefore, it would be inaccurate to say that current warming and weather trends cause hurricanes in general or make any particular hurricane more severe than it would have otherwise been. In fact, there’s an emerging hypothesis about the connection between solar weather and terrestrial weather (have you noticed all the chatter about the visibility of the Northern Lights, caused by solar flares and “weather”). I generally find it helps me relax to consider that the causes of major global events are almost always multi-causal and multifaceted, typically more complicated than what can be summed up in a headline.
Anti-anxiety: Part of fighting the good fight of the Christian life is replacing our false thoughts with God’s thoughts and our disordered desires with holy desires. While I have great sympathy and tenderness toward the young people I talked with over the deli counter at the Jewel, they were engaged with lousy patterns of false thinking. For example, “The world is ending, so I should never have kids.”
No doubt, all of us are going to be plagued by false thoughts. That’s why we need a spiritual practice to combat our bad thoughts and replace them with God’s. Traditionally, Christians have done something like this:
Notice when I felt sad, anxious, dark or depressed recently. For example: When Hurricane Milton made landfall, I felt hopeless for the state of the planet.
Name the deeper thought beneath your feelings. For example, bad weather is an indicator that the world might be ending soon.
Replace your dark inner monologue with something that God says, preferably from the Scriptures. For example Psalm 27:13-14
I remain confident of this:
I will see the goodness of the Lord
in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord;
be strong and take heart
and wait for the Lord.
This little spiritual exercise, transforming our sad feelings and false thoughts by replacing them with God’s Words, is an amazing inner miracle of transformation whenever it happens. It’s a transformation that I hope happens for at least a few people at every worship service at our little church. Perhaps it can happen this week for you, too.
~ Pastor Gregg