I happened to arrive home alone from the airport one night in the middle of what newscasters like to call an "outage." I much prefer to call it a power failure. I could have unpacked my suitcase and found something to eat by candlelight--I lived for years with no other kind--but there was a show going on which I did not want to miss. I sat by the window and watched a storm over the ocean--driving rain and nearly continuous lightning, flashing in a hundred places along miles of horizon. Sometimes great billows of stormcloud were thrown into relief by a bright sheet of light from behind. Sometimes jagged bolts of lightning cracked the heavens, stabbing the skyline of Scituate and Cohasset to the southwest (our house faces south from Cape Ann over Massachusetts Bay). The rain swept the deck and blasted the windowpane while thunder, one of the many voices of God, rolled and crashed.

Where is the place of understanding? God understands the way to it, and he knows its place. For he looks to the ends of the earth. . . . When he made a decree for the rain and a way for the lightning of the thunder, then he saw it and declared it; he established it and searched it out. And he said to man, "Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding."

Job 28 20-28

It is well that men should fear God when they have not yet learned to love him. It is the beginning. People who have loved him, even for a lifetime, do not lose but rather gain reverence and awe, even godly dread.

Lightning is several times associated with the Lord's appearances in Scripture. The face of the man clothed in linen who came to Daniel during his three weeks' mourning and fasting was "like the appearance of lightning, his eyes like flaming torches." The same is said of the angel that rolled back the stone from Jesus' grave. John had a vision of a throne in heaven from which issued flashes of lightning and voices and peals of thunder. When the angel of the Seventh Seal took a golden censer and threw it on the earth, "there were peals of thunder, loud noises, flashing of lightning, and an earthquake."

When Mt. St. Helens exploded, it poured volcanic ash on the Northwest which floated as far as our coast. I woke one morning to find the sea shrouded in a strange pinkish brown fog.

There have been earthquakes in California and Nevada.

People call such things acts of God. They are awesome and often terrifying.

What of the acts of men? A seminary student who was in the navy for ten years told me of weapons now perfected by the Russians which would enable them to win a war without killing millions of people, but simply by knocking out our arsenals and disabling our equipment. I saw a documentary film which graphically contrasted U.S. military strength to Russia's. Our position appeared extremely precarious. A "missile eater" impressed me most--a defense weapon Russia now has which seems to annihilate missiles, snatching them out of the air before they can reach their targets.

I am not afraid for myself. But I confess I am tempted to be afraid for my grandchildren. They are with me now, a boy of three and a girl whose first birthday will be this week. What will they suffer?

The signs God gives us of his power and glory (thunder and lightning, for example), to say nothing of the unimaginable forces which he puts into men's hands and allows them to harness for their own often evil purposes, are in themselves fearsome.

As I watched God's storm that night I thought of his wonderful name, Father of Lights. Then as I saw the distant marine beacons sending their beams across the waves, they reminded me as they do every night of the Father's mercy. We live in a world created by his almighty power but corrupted by man's pride and selfishness. We need a place of safety--as Walter and Elisabeth need a place of safety as they grow up. There is one, but only one. It is the Father's arms. He will not--indeed, if he is to redeem and make us holy, he cannot--protect us from all suffering.

George MacDonald, in his novel What's Mine's Mine, wrote:

There are tenderhearted people who virtually object to the whole scheme of creation. They would neither have force used nor pain suffered; they talk as if kindness could do everything, even where it is not felt. Millions of human beings but for suffering would never develop an atom of affection. The man who would spare due suffering is not wise. Because a thing is unpleasant, it is folly to conclude it ought not to be. There are powers to be born, creations to be perfected, sinners to be redeemed, through the ministry of pain, to be born, perfected, redeemed, in no other way.

I am thankful that there are some earthly fathers who understand this. One of them wrote to me of a visit to the doctor with his three-year-old son who was limping as a result of a fall or a collision with a child in the church nursery.

"Walt was in the backseat as the two of us rode down to the doctor's. There, I told him to wait a minute while I checked to make sure the doctor was in his office. The receptionist told me I could catch him over at the hospital in the emergency room. I came out to the car and drove to the hospital.

"Walt III: 'Where we goin', Daddy?'

" 'We're going to see if the doctor will check your foot out at the hospital. Won't that be neat?'

"(A pause.) 'Uh . . . Daddy, I think it'll be okay if we go on home. Yeah . . . I think it'd be better after while. Whyn't we just go home, 'kay?'

" 'Son, we're going to go see if we can get the doctor to check and make sure everything is okay.'

"(A tiny hint of a whine.) 'Daddy, I'm sure it's gon' be better now, okay?'

"At the hospital: 'Walter, let's get out and go into the hospital. Everything is going to be all right. Just hold my hand.'

"In the emergency room he wanted to sit in my lap. The clerk asked the names and how we were going to pay, etc. Then the wait. We move to a row of chairs against the wall, and Walt III chooses to sit in my lap this time with more enthusiasm. His eyes are big and wide. He's very solemn, head moving around, taking it all in.

" 'Daddy, we've been here before.'

" 'Yes, Walt, we were here. Remember the time your leg was broken and Daddy put you in that green blanket and brought you here? The doctor looked at your leg and then they took you to take some pictures of your leg?'

" 'Hunh.' (That means yes.) 'I 'member dat.'

" 'Shall we pray together?' His head bows quickly.

" 'Kay.'

"A prayer in which I asked for courage for both of us. And thanking the Lord that we could trust him. Walt III much more relieved, even calmed completely.

"A nurse calls his name, and we go into a room to be seen by the doctor. It was hard to keep from carrying him, but I wanted the doctor to see Walt's limp, and too, I kept saying to myself, 'Let's not smother him. Let's help him grow up and learn to lean on the Lord himself.'

"In the room we both sit on the table. I take off his shoe and sock (I was fearful that the original break was damaged again) and we hear a lady crying in the next room. Walt's eyes get wide and he says,

" 'Daddy, what's the matter with that lady?'

" 'She is hurting and she is scared. Are you afraid, son?'

" 'No, Lord Jesus take care of me.'

" 'Well, let's pray for her, okay?'

" 'Kay.'

"A prayer. And sure enough, the lady seems to calm down. And the doctor's there now, asking Walt where it hurts. Then, off to x-ray. A nurse comes to talk to Walt.

" 'Now listen--if we hurt you then you can cry. But if we don't hurt you, you are not to cry, okay?'

" 'Kay.' She picks him up (he holds tightly to her, eyes very wide) and just before she takes him off he says to me, 'Daddy, we've been here before. Where you gon' be? In this room waiting for me?' (The x-ray process had terrified him when the nurse took him from us a year ago.)

" 'Yes, son, I'll be right here, waiting for you.' Fifteen minutes later the nurse brought him back to me, raving about what a neat kid he was. Apparently he had kept talking to them the entire time.

"No bones broken. We go back to the doctor. I tell Walt to be sure and thank the doctor as we leave. Walt goes about twenty feet out of his way from the exit to say, 'Thank you, doctor. We gon' to family night supper at the church.'

"Next night he happily sang to himself in the dark for about thirty minutes. I went to the bedroom to hug him and tell him,

" 'Walt, I'm proud of you for three reasons. One, you were very sweet in the tub when Mom washed your hair. Two, you make me happy singing so nicely to yourself in the dark. Three. . . .'

" 'But Daddy--you making too much racket!' Then he grabs me and hugs me, giggling.

"Thank you, Lord, for that boy!"

And thank you, Lord, for that father, strong in his faith in you, strong enough in his love for the little child to lead him also to trust you.

I am sobered by the response of a tiny boy. With reason enough to fear, he resolved not to. How often my own faith deteriorates into a mere condition, shaped by circumstances, rather than a calm resolve, founded on one whose word I have come to trust. Perfect love casts out fear.

And what of the weeping woman in the next room? Was she calmed? Would she have believed, if told, that the God of Peace had laid his hands on her--in answer to the prayers of a little boy with a hurt foot? The God who rides stormclouds is also the God of Peace. The one who makes darkness his covering is also the Father of Lights.

Copyright© 1988, by Elisabeth Elliot
all rights reserved.