Chapter Two
Something woke me up near dawn Monday morning, and I glanced out the window. Alarm bells went off in my head; the sky was a deep reddish-orange, which in Indiana meant tornado weather on the way. The previous day had been unseasonably warm, after all, so maybe a cold front coming through would crash into that warm air and make for some nasty thunderstorms.
All those thoughts went through my head in a matter of a few seconds, before my head crashed back to the pillow and I went back to sleep for several more hours. Finally, feeling slothful, I made myself get up and go through the motions of getting ready.
I still had a few album reviews that I hadn’t typed out, and I was curious whether Danny might have any more that I could write. I grabbed my notebook and climbed the stairs to his room, where he answered the door.
“Come on in, Eli,” he told me. “I feel like we haven’t talked in forever.”
“We haven’t. It’s been almost a week. How are things?”
“Things are good. Church stuff is going well, life is grand, weather’s beautiful. At least, it has been. They’re talking about bad storms for tonight.”
“I figured. The sky was red when I woke up, and that’s never a good sign.”
“Seriously?” His brow furrowed. “We city folk never learn these things.”
I chuckled. “Never too late to start. I brought a few more of my album reviews. Any chance I can borrow your computer for a few minutes?”
“I’ll type them for you, if you want,” he offered. “The check for the one they’re printing should be here next week, by the way.”
“Nice,” I said, handing over my notebook. “Thanks for everything you’ve done on that. And you may be amused to know that I’ve written a song with words from one of the psalms.”
“Oh yeah? You’ll have to play it for me sometime. Sorry, I don’t mean to rush you out the door, but I’ve got an appointment in a couple minutes. I’ll type your reviews later today.”
“Yeah, sure. Sorry. I didn’t mean to keep you.”
“Not at all. Take care of yourself.”
I hadn’t even made it back to my room by the time Stanley waylaid me. “Hey, Jarrius is outside. He wants you to come downstairs.”
“Did he say why?”
“Trust me. Just grab a jacket and go.”
Thoroughly confused, I ducked back into my room for a coat and launched myself down the stairs and out the front door, to where Jarrius’ Escalade was idling at the sidewalk. One of the rear doors was already open, waiting for me; Jarrius was behind the wheel, with Julius in the front seat next to him and Willy in the backseat. “Where are we off to?” I asked, jumping into the seat and slamming the door behind me.
“The desert,” Jarrius said.
“Excuse me?”
“Best place to go when a storm is coming.”
I sat in silence for a couple of seconds. “I’m afraid I still don’t get it.”
“Alright, you went on the hiking trip at Mineral Wells a few weeks ago, right? And you saw how beautiful God is because you saw the beauty of his creation?”
“Yeah,” I said, picturing the place in my head again, remembering the way the sunlight through the trees had dazzled me and made me think about beauty in a new way.
“Well, beauty isn’t all there is to God,” Jarrius continued. “He’s powerful too, and sometimes he’s even dangerous. There’s a place out in the desert we like to go during storms, just to watch the dangerous side of creation.”
“Sounds interesting.” In truth, I was a bit worried, because I’d seen my fair share of bad thunderstorms and tornadoes in Indiana, and while they did have a certain appeal to them, they could very easily kill someone who took them too lightly. But I watched out the window as the city melted away, replaced by an endless expanse of rocky dirt and runty bushes. The clouds overhead marched steadily closer, and in a matter of minutes, Jarrius was exiting the interstate, wheeling the Escalade down a winding stretch of back roads.
Momentarily the road crested a large hill, and Jarrius pulled over on top of it. We sat for a moment, watching the weather, smelling the rain on the winds that swept out of the west. There was no one else in sight. The road we’d driven in on stretched out endlessly to the north and south, disappearing over the horizon, leaving four people standing under the sky. Surrounded by so much nature, I felt very, very small.
Jarrius climbed up the back bumper, hauling himself onto the roof of the Escalade, where he stood, defiantly facing the coming storm. “Get up here,” he told me, and I pushed up onto the bumper, grabbing his outstretched hand.
The others made their way up and stood next to us, and Julius pulled a pocket Bible out of his jacket. He had a couple of pages bookmarked. “Oh Lord my God, you are very great!” he read. “The Lord lays the foundation of his palace on the waters above, making the clouds his chariot, walking on the wings of the wind. Psalm 104.”
We stood in worshipful silence, feeling the wind wrap itself around us. I felt like God was right there with us, smiling as he watched us marvel at what he was doing. I’d been skeptical of Jarrius’ plan a few hours before, but all that doubt melted away when I looked full in the face of what God could do with just a few clouds and some warm and cold air colliding.
Julius continued. “Job 38. God answered Job out of the storm. Were you there when I laid the earth’s foundations, while all the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy? Have you ever given orders to the morning or shown the dawn its place? Who endowed the heart with wisdom, or gave understanding to the mind?” He flipped one more time. “Habakkuk 2. The Lord is in his holy temple. Let all the earth keep silent before him.”
So we did, watching as lightning began to tear apart the earth to the far west. It rolled toward us over the plain, the wind blasting my pants so they flapped like a flag, and then the rain hit. Big, fat drops splattered the soil, clanking off the roof of the Escalade, turning into a torrential downpour so thick we could barely see a hundred yards. Every couple of seconds we could still see flashes of lightning, growing closer, punctuated almost instantly by ear-splitting thunder. Ominously, the next gust of wind was frigidly cold, one of the first signs of a tornado.
We climbed down then, getting back in the truck so we weren’t targets for the lightning, but watched out the window in rapt fascination as the fury of nature unleashed itself on the desert. At the base of the hill, a stream was forming, as rain pounded the dirt and found no place to go but downhill.
Lightning slammed to earth fifty yards away, making all of us jump, and the resounding thunder left a ringing in my ears. All around us, earth and sky were bursting with power. For obvious reasons, I’d never looked at the weather and seen God before. Now, in a different light, I was in awe of what I saw. It intrigued me that the three guys with me, city dwellers, had stumbled upon this secret when I, growing up in the woods and hills, had completely missed it.
As quickly as it had come, the storm was gone, blowing away off to the east, to send thousands of people in Fort Worth scurrying indoors. Jarrius put the Escalade in gear and set about turning us back to the interstate.
A respectful, almost worshipful silence still hung inside the truck, and I was reluctant to break it, but I had to know. “Why did you guys start doing this?”
Julius answered. “About a year ago, we were looking through the book of Romans. There’s a part at the very beginning where Paul says that God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, are clearly visible. God made creation on purpose so it would say something about him. And we were all, like, surprised, cause we’d never thought if that way. We grew up around pavement, you know? Who looks at the weather and stuff and expects to see God?”
“Stanley told us to come out here,” Willy said. “Said we’d understand after we saw. He was right, and we come out here a couple times a
year just to be reminded.”
“Sometimes people ask me why God doesn’t do miracles anymore,” Jarrius added, after a long pause. “I ask them when was the last time they saw a thunderstorm. God still moves, man. It’s just people forget what to look for. We get jaded. We get used to everything.”
The Escalade turned onto the frontage road, then merged back onto the interstate, slick wet asphalt humming underneath the tires. The road was deserted; everyone else had fled before the power of the storm.
“And that’s cool to know,” Jarrius continued. “The same God who’s powerful to blow the earth apart with lightning is powerful to handle any situation in my life. He reminds people of that all the time, it’s just they don’t realize he’s trying to remind them. He’s calling their name and they ain’t listening.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just watched the landscape as the clouds lifted off the horizon, exposing the sun as it wandered toward the west, shining its light on the underside of the black and puffy rainclouds still hanging in the east. Jarrius rolled the windows down and the breeze billowed in, filling the truck with the scent of rain.
I imagined God, brushing his hands off and smiling at the way we’d been in awe of his handiwork, glad that someone had appreciated the creation that he’d taken pains to put together just so it would be awesome to us. I didn’t know what to say; I was just humbled, stunned by the quick reminder of how very small I was and how very big God was. I like to think that God got the message anyway, even though I didn’t have any words to say to him.
The Escalade rolled on toward Fort Worth, leaving the site of a miracle in our rearview mirror.
New Heart Church Page 28
