The Sunday Letter
A couple of Sundays back I wrote to you about the heat, and I suppose the sky decided all that heat deserved an answer, because this week the storms came through.
If you have spent a summer in the South, you know the rhythm of it. The morning starts bright and gets heavy. By early afternoon the air goes still, so still you notice it, and off past the treeline the clouds begin to stack up like they are being built by hand. The light turns a strange green-gold. The first thunder comes from a long way off, more felt than heard, and every dog in the neighborhood knows about it before the weatherman does.
And then it arrives. The wind picks up all at once, the trees show the pale side of their leaves, and the first fat drops hit the driveway one at a time, each one the size of a half dollar, until they quit falling one at a time altogether. There is no rain like a July rain in the South. It does not drizzle. It commits.
I sat on the porch for one of them this week and did what Southerners have always done in weather like that, which is nothing at all. Just sat and watched it come. The porch is the best seat in the house for a storm, close enough to feel the temperature drop ten degrees in five minutes, dry enough to enjoy every bit of it. The gutters roared. The power flickered once, thought about it, and held on. And inside of an hour the whole show had moved on, the sun came back out, and the yard steamed like a kitchen.
Here is what I love about a summer storm down here. It does its work and moves along. The garden gets the drink the hose never quite delivers. The air gets rinsed clean, and for one merciful evening the heat lets go a little. The birds start back up like nothing happened. What looked for twenty minutes like the end of the world turns out to be the very thing the ground was waiting on.
We talk about storms like they are interruptions. Most of the time, down here at least, they are deliveries.
Until next Sunday,
Porch Light
A brief Sunday reflection from Blessed South
There is a thing that happens after a Southern storm that I have come to love almost more than the storm itself. The quiet. Not the dead stillness that comes before, when the air is holding its breath, but the soft, dripping quiet that comes after, when the worst has passed and the world starts finding its voice again. A single bird. Then another. Water running off the eaves in no hurry at all.
I have noticed that we do most of our praying in the before and the during. When the sky goes dark, when the wind stands the trees up sideways, we call on the Lord with everything in us. And that is right and good. But I wonder how often we forget to sit in the after. To be still on the porch once the danger has moved on, and simply be grateful that we were carried through.
“Be still, and know that I am God.” — Psalm 46:10
I used to read that verse as an instruction for the storm, a word to steady me while the wind was blowing. And it is that. But the psalm it comes from is a storm psalm through and through. It talks of mountains falling into the sea, of waters roaring and foaming. And right there in the middle of all that trouble, the voice says: be still. Not because the storm is not real, but because the One who speaks is stronger than it.
Being still is not the same as doing nothing. It is the hardest thing some of us ever do. It means unclenching our hands. It means trusting that the God who held us through the wind is not going to drop us in the calm. It means letting the quiet after the storm actually reach us, instead of bracing for the next one already forming on the horizon.
So tonight, if a storm has just passed through your life, or through your sky, I hope you will let yourself sit in the after. Listen for the first bird. Feel the porch under your feet. And know that the same God who was in the boat, asleep and unafraid, is with you now in the quiet just as surely as He was in the noise. The light is still on. It always was.
And if this brought you something today, share it with someone who’d enjoy it too.