Facing the Storm: A true story of a supernatural encounter
I can’t do justice to the years and years of turmoil that led to this one supernatural moment about five years ago when I was living in Australia. I can only give you the briefest summary.
For twenty long years, I had followed God where he led, trying to fulfil what I believed was a calling to get my fantasy novels out to the world; books God had given me to write. I constantly took the next path and the next only to have a door slammed in my face. I’d fall into a heap and God would say, “Get up. Let’s go again.” So I’d get up. Then he’d disappear for a while, leaving me feeling empty and lonely. Long months later he’d reappear and say, “This way,” and I’d try again, hopeful that this time it would be the moment I broke the glass ceiling. There would be another slammed door, silence, emptiness, confusion, pain. Each time I fell I asked if I could quit. And each time, God said very clearly, “No.”
After twenty years of watching my passion and my dream become my greatest burden, shame and pain, I was completely burned out. One more time I asked God if I could quit. This time he was silent. He was leaving it up to me. And so the painful divorce began. I packed up my writing career, pulled every trace of my books from the market, and refused to talk about the books any longer. My voice died within me. I was deeply, deeply wounded.
During that time, I tried to heal. I had thought the knock-down punches over, but something worse was to come. God led me down one more path – a very clear path – and it quickly, in the space of a few weeks, became the biggest blow of all. It shattered me.
I was done with God. I had been close to being done with God a few times, but this time I was Done with a capital D. I told God I was through. I actually told him to ‘stuff off’, though in much stronger words. I told God I was his, saved by grace, and therefore I’d see him in heaven, but I was done with the following part.
And that was the beginning of the abyss.
If I ever want to know what a life of great pain is like without a relationship with God in it, I only have to remember what followed telling God to go away. It was a kind of mania the likes of which I have never experienced before. I would pace the floor endlessly. Pace. Back and forth, from the front door to the back door, or around and around my dining room table. I could not think, or read, or talk. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. Every second of the day was a kind of acute pain.
I’ve never before endured weeks in a single day. I could almost hear the clocks ticking, counting out the emptiness that remained after I told God I was done, like the countdown to death and decay. Life had lost all of its meaning, and with it, any sense of stability and peace. I wanted to rip my spirit out of my body so I couldn’t feel it anymore. It was like my spirit was trapped and banging against the cages of my flesh, smashing itself trying to break free and couldn’t. It was screaming inside, like someone pressed inside an upright pitch-dark coffin, screaming for someone to find them and release them before the serial killer returns to carve them up. Every smash against the sides of my flesh was a literal second of time and an almost physical pain.
One day I was in such excruciating agony, and had been thrashing and screaming inside my flesh for such long hours as I paced around and around our dining room table, that I cried out to God:
“How am I supposed to get through today let alone the rest of my life? Find me a purpose or take me home. I can’t live this way anymore. I just want to die.”
Later that day, after dinner when the late spring sun was yet to fade in the sky, the weather started to go very strange. I was sitting in my lounge room, a large, spacious white room with a cathedral ceiling and two glass doors that slid open to a deck overlooking miles of national park. I was gazing out those glass doors at the sky turning almost mustard grey. It started to swirl like a maelstrom. And then it descended. It was a huge disc above us, a spinning record, and it just came straight down on our house.
It was wild. The wind was louder than I have ever heard in my life. Huge thick trees were bowing over, and all the colours went mustard. I am told that astonishingly, someone recorded that our area had a small tornado, right above our town, and I can tell you it was probably right above our house. Let’s just be clear: Australia doesn’t usually have tornadoes. They’re not unheard of, but they’re exceptionally rare and not usually big and destructive, and we just never got anything like this kind of weather in our mild Southern Highlands of New South Wales.
I don’t like storms at all. Most of the time I cope, but sometimes they scare me. It’s the thunder. A sudden loud, unexpected crack of it causes adrenaline to explode inside me, and adrenaline and I are not friends. I’ve discovered that the best way to handle it is to watch for lightning and block my ears until the counting method shows the storm receding.
My son, Tristan, at this time was young, about ten years old, and he hated storms even more than I did. They terrified him so much that he would be scared on a cloudless day that it would get so hot, a storm might happen, or he would be scared on a cloudy day that it meant a storm.
On this particular evening while it was still supposed to be light outside, the thunder and lightning were constant and directly above us, so that the lightning literally never stopped and the thunder cracked so close, it seemed like metres from our house.
I have, in all my years, never heard anything like it. I decided that the only way to cope was to face it head-on by sitting in a chair staring at the glass doors and watch the lightning flash, and try to count.
Flash! “One …” Bang! Flash. “One …” Bang.” Flash-bang. Flash-bang. Flash-bang.
My husband was in my son’s room holding him tight while my son wore noise-cancelling headphones which we bought him just for this. We get a lot of storms in the summer in Australia and when it’s your child’s phobia, that makes for a long, tense summer.
This evening, as I watched this swirling, mustard storm that had turned the day into almost night, a peace came over me, the likes of which I have never experienced before. It was thick and tangible, like a blanketing and comforting presence in the room. It was like someone put noise cancelling headphones over my ears and mind. Everything quieted down yet the storm and the noise had not changed. I felt entirely calm. The roof could have literally ripped off at that moment and I would still have felt perfectly calm.
I knew it was God, and I remember saying to him, “Why can’t it always be like this?”
And a voice replied clearly in my mind, “It can.”
“It can?”
The voice said so clearly, I can still hear it now: “The storm is out there.”
“That night completely changed me. God took the blackest, hardest time of my life – the dissolution of all dreams and the moment I truly gave up on God – and he used the mighty power of a violent spinning storm to show me a glimpse of who he really is …”
I just love how God picks the fewest amount of words to say so much. I knew exactly what he meant. The storm was beyond the glass doors of my room, swirling and threatening, but inside this room, it was peace and calm and even quiet. I realised what he was saying to me. I had let the storm in. I was always letting the storm in. But the storm was out there, and as long as I kept those glass doors closed, that’s exactly where it would remain.
Whatever happened to me, no matter how many doors closed in my face, and no matter how many roads ended up a dead end, the storm was out there. But I had always, for twenty years, let the storm in. I had made it about me and my relationship with God, or about my self-esteem, or about my career and my ministry, or about how much God loved me, or about my dreams to change the world. I had let it all in and let it swirl me about in its huge tornado circles and throw me against the rocks time and time again. But the storm was out there.
I sat in that peaceful state for half an hour, watching and wanting this storm to go on forever. But as if to confirm that this was God and not my imagination, I said to God, “I have to get my son to bed by 8:00 and he’s in his bedroom terrified. He won’t be able to sleep if the storm is still raging.”
This wasn’t an indulgent mum thing to say or the words of a routine-obsessed woman. (I’m a dreamer and no good with routines, believe me.) My son was and in some ways still is a special needs child and sleep matters to him. When I made the request to God, I knew that this was something that was pretty important to Tristan’s well-being.
“So,” I added, “if the storm could end at 7:45, that would be great.” I look back now at the connection I had with God in that moment; that strong, strong awareness of his presence and wonder that I didn’t even question that a storm doesn’t just switch off like the TV. I just knew I was having a moment with God, and at 7:45 I had somewhere else I had to be if God was done with me by then.
I kid you not, that at exactly 7:45, that great swirling disc of a storm just lifted up. It literally lifted like a UFO, up into the sky, straight up like it had only come to circle our house, and then it dissipated until we had clear blue skies left. Not a trace of a storm. In about thirty seconds. At 7:45!
“Whatever happened to me, no matter how many doors closed in my face, and no matter how many roads ended up a dead end, the storm was out there.”
That night completely changed me. God took the blackest, hardest time of my life – the dissolution of all dreams and the moment I truly gave up on God – and he used the mighty power of a violent spinning storm to show me a glimpse of who he really is and how I might rest in that.
It is a lesson that still helps me. I have never forgotten that the storm is out there. That doesn’t mean that I don’t ever let the storm in. I still do. But I am aware now that I am doing it and can stop myself.
Recently, my husband found the courage to leave a job he has had for twenty-one years. Jeff is someone who likes the stability of the familiar. It doesn’t mean he hates change, but he does worry. Worry is a lurking shadow that blocks a lot of the sun in his life. Some people thrive on the new and the adventures of the unknown. Others find themselves playing the ‘what if’ game instead. What if I can’t feed my family? What if I can’t get a job? What if I can never find what I love to do? It took him five years to work up the courage to leave, though during that time God sent us to the UK, and when the time to leave truly came, God made it clear.
As of writing this, he is in the transition period. He is wrapping up from one job with a week to go, and about to start the next. Most of Jeff’s life has happened whilst working for that company. He was one of the original employees, one of five of them, and so helped the company grow from the ground up to the large organisation it is today. We were newly married when he took the job. We have lived in many homes, bought our first house, our second, our third, our fourth, and lived around the world during that time. We had our son during that time and he is now sixteen. For almost all of what Jeff remembers of adult working life, that company has been a part of it.
But companies that grow big don’t tend to keep the small-company philosophies that made the company so attractive to us. Jeff saw the problems creeping in over many years until they became a burden he could not bear. God opened a way for a new job, and though there is hope in the change, there is worry and anxiety too.
Facing the unknown is hard, but I remember that supernatural storm.
And so to encourage him during this time, I painted him this:
“Facing the storm.”
Watercolour, 9″x7″
It is about having the courage to leave the shores of the familiar even when the great storm is approaching and saying to it: “I’m not afraid of you.” It’s about knowing you might feel like one small ship taking on or outrunning a mighty storm, but if you look carefully, the skulking storm is everywhere but where the ship is. The storm is out there. God will provide a way to sail through that storm or have you always ahead of it. You just have to keep your eyes ahead, not on the black clouds behind that look like they want to swallow you whole.
I share it with you now because you might have black clouds amassing around you too. And the wind might be threatening to drown you, and you might wish you could sail back to land where it’s safer. But the storm is out there. For those who trust in our Father God, the storm is out there. God has deemed the storm will rage around you, but not through you. But you have to keep your eyes on him. The storm can only affect you if you let it in. ■
[See more of my art in the Art Gallery.]
About the Author: Lisa Saul
