Nobody Really Has It Together...

Nobody really has it together. There are a lot of us who kind of pretend we have it together. Who have a nice façade of “togetherness” but some where there is a soft spot, a problem or a life difficulty that isn’t really all together.

I have often taught what I call the storm principle. The storm principle states that everyone is in one of three places in their life. They are either in the middle of a storm, just finally coming out of a storm or in that brief calm before the storm. A lot of our storms are not even of our own making, they are the result of other’s actions that impact our life. The storm is always nearby, so if you are in the calm place, enjoy it while you can.

This brings us back to the statement above about nobody really having it together. I guess a truer statement is that at any giving time everything that you have together can fall apart. The law of entropy takes over and things really do tend to move to a state of disorder. I know of not less than three competent, capable and respected professionals that in the past couple of weeks have been told, for no apparent reason, that they were being laid off. These are not the people that that kind of thing happens to. These are the “go to” people who come early, stay late, and go above and beyond. These are the people that their coworkers turn to in times of difficulty and trouble, but decisions above their pay grade were made to eliminate them from their respective organizations. They thought they had it all together and it fell apart. The storm came, seemingly out of the blue, and it hit hard.

Others of us have been asked to endure the storm a little longer, or indefinitely. We discussed opportunities and options that never occurred. Our ability to trust has been diminished and we feel like we are forgotten or at least taken for granted. Our storm is not one of crashing waves and lightening, but one of being stranded in the middle of an endless ocean with no breeze in our sails and no pull upon our lives. It is a storm of deafening calm, of waveless waiting and of mirages on the horizon that turn out to be nothing more than hopeful figments of our imagination. So you sit and pray for a breeze, a direction, a destination.

I used to think I knew people who had it together. Who never faltered, who never doubted or who never struggled. But, eventually, even they had a storm that, at least for awhile, overtook them. They to were caught unaware and unready for the unexpected blow from the storms of life. Nobody really has it all together.

We travelers in the storm, what do we do? How do we continue when the skies are dark and the rain is cold? Today I do not have words of encouragement, I only have words of the one who promised to be a light into a dark world. Today I am looking for the light and hoping that the light I see is not a train at the other end of the tunnel. I remain…

In the Storm,
Marty Cauley

Gracious God who comes to us in the storm, bring light into the darkness and peace into the midst of the storm. In the name of the One who endured a storm beyond compare, Jesus, I pray. Amen