Worrying Twice

I don’t like extreme weather. In my lifetime, it has played too many tricks on me.

Once as a child, a tornado went through the small orchard behind our house. At our farm around the corner it picked up the barn ever so slightly and sat it down again on its foundation, just a little bit askew. It relocated a corn crib to the middle of a bare field.

One slushy night when I had no business being out (What was my mother thinking of?), a friend and I ended up in a ditch when the slush wouldn’t let him drive as he desired. A neighboring farmer pulled us out. That wasn’t the only ditch in which I’ve landed due to something other than a clear road surface under my tires.

When I was seven months pregnant for Gabe, on a day very much like the past 24 hours have been here in icy Indiana weather-wise, Michael and I made a last-minute change to our holiday plans and traveled by train from our home in Arkansas to our family in Michigan to avoid driving through the ice storm that socked in the nation’s mid-section for several days.

Deluge rains have flooded my basement in a major way at least twice in recent years.

So, you see why extreme weather might stir me up just a bit.

All day, I’ve been watching the limbs and the wires behind my house. Earlier, we watched as quite a few large limbs plummeted from the heights to become debris filling the back yard. We have been holding our collective breath that the electrical wires would not be caught by any of the falling firewood or snap due to icy weight they could no longer bear.

Now it is bedtime. I have two choices: I can lie awake listening for every little snap, crackle, or pop that might be a breaking branch or power line. Or I can rest.

I have tried to learn to take this course of action when worrisome things come about: I at least articulate the worst-case scenario. Then, when I am thinking straight, I talk to God about it. I tell Him my fears and that I am going to let Him deal with it, trusting the care of an all-wise, loving Heavenly Father.

Easy? No. And I don’t always manage it. But the alternative is the possibility of worrying twice. If the bad thing happens–the power lines snap, the branches land on my house–I will have expended my emotional energy twice. If nothing happens, I will have spent it needlessly. In either case, I will have been a worrywort, which is not what my Father expects of His child.

So…God of wind and waves, who sees the ice on my trees and backyard power lines, I trust it all to your care in these overnight hours.