“There is peculiar terror in a tempest at sea, when…the raging sea echoes to the angry sky,” reads an excerpt from “The Treasury of David” concerning Psalm 29. “There is no sight more alarming than the flash of lightning around the mast of the ship, and no sound more calculated to inspire reverent awe than the roar of the storm.”
Such was her experience that afternoon – one of awe – as she watched from her window the storm that was brewing.
The brilliant orb of the sun, the herald of the day, was succumbing slowly to the oncoming night, relinquishing its domain to unnatural gloom.
Miles out to sea an ominous black mountain of clouds had gathered.
Even from where she stood, she could see cascading down the sides of that mountain a grey avalanche of drenching rain.
Obliterating everything in its path, the smothering deluge rushed shoreward, driven onward, its fury unleashed by an unseen hand.
Like a giant street sweeper in the sky, the mountainous onslaught whipped the sea below into white-capping foam, then beat a thunderous staccato against her window, the lights flickered, and all beyond that thin sheet of glass disappeared behind the curtain created by the torrential downpour.
It was a panorama of power.
Then, as suddenly as it had come, it was gone.
The sea settled into an uneasy truce with the sky as if fearing a repeat of the rage that moments before had caused such great disturbance.
The sky, for its part, was splashed with color – gold and red and streaks of orange dominating the horizon, chasing away, and forbidding the return of the angry dark remnants of the reluctantly retreating storm.
And in the carefully tended flower garden as she wandered out, drinking in the beauty after the storm, she paused for a moment before the two blossoms in particular that caught her attention, one tall (‘that certainly is like him,’ she thought), the other short (‘and that certainly is like me.’)
Both blossoms had survived.
‘Like us.’
