The Storm: An Ocean in a Soda Can

The lightning came first as a flicker behind the clouds, then as a crack that shook the porch screens, then as a full sky lit white for half a second before the thunder rolled in behind it. I sat out through the whole thing. This has been one of the driest years Tampa Bay has seen in decades, and the yard had been showing it—so when the first heavy drops finally hit, it didn't feel like an inconvenience. It felt like relief. It felt like being answered.

Scripture has a passage practically written for mornings like this one. "The voice of the Lord is upon the waters: the God of glory thundereth… The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty… The voice of the Lord divideth the flames of fire." (Psalm 29:3–4, 7) And after the storm passes, the same psalm lands here: "The Lord sits enthroned over the flood… the Lord will give strength unto his people; the Lord will bless his people with peace." (Psalm 29:10–11)

That's the whole arc of it—power that could shatter cedars, followed by peace. It's almost too on the nose. It's also exactly what a drought-relief thunderstorm feels like.

I've been reading Crazy Love by Francis Chan, and he has an illustration that hasn't left me alone since I read it. Imagine your mind is the size of a soda can. Now imagine God's greatness is the ocean. Scoop the can through the water and what you pull out is real—it's genuinely ocean water—but it's such a laughably small sample that it can't begin to represent what's actually out there. That's what happens every time I try to wrap my head around a God big enough to speak a universe into existence, one we're still discovering new galaxies of by the thousands, and precise enough to also engineer a tiny ant that can carry a hundred times its own body weight. My "understanding" of that is a soda can. His reality is the ocean.

It's the same tension the old hymn writers kept bumping into—the ones who'd look up at rolling thunder or a star-filled sky and find themselves undone by how great, how mighty, how far past comprehension the whole thing was, and have nothing left to do but worship.

There's another psalm that fits a drought-breaking storm even better than the thunder does: "Thou visitest the earth, and waterest it… thou preparest them corn… Thou crownest the year with thy goodness; and thy paths drop fatness." (Psalm 65:9–11) Watching the yard finally get soaked after this dry a year, that's not poetic language to me. That's just what happened on the porch this morning.

Here's the part that gets me every time. This is the same God who set the stars in place and split the sky with lightning, and the Bible says He also numbers the hairs on my head: "But the very hairs of your head are all numbered." (Matthew 10:30) I've noticed it says numbered, not counted. Counted would just mean He knows the total. Numbered means each one has a number—which means He knows which ones have already fallen and which ones are still waiting to come in. At my current rate, I'm hoping the second list is longer than the first. It's not looking good.

But that's the whole point. The God whose power I can't fit in a soda can, the God behind a display of light and sound big enough to make me feel small on my own porch—that same God isn't distant. He's not just aware that I exist somewhere in the crowd. He knows the details. He knows me. What am I, that the God who thunders over oceans should know the number of hairs on my head, let alone love what's under them?

That's not a small thing to sit with. That's worth staying out on the porch for, long after the rain stops.