The perfect storm? Odd title (for book and movie both), don’t you think, considering the outcome is death?
Sebastian Junger wrote the true account, and moony George Clooney starred in the film of the North Atlantic storm that took the lives of fisherman on the Andrea Gail and well-trained rescue workers. It was a hundred-year storm – a rare thing. It was actually a dreadful collision of storms that left all those caught in it dead.
All the storms we get caught in are not the wind and water type. Some of them we kick up ourselves, and others just catch us unawares.
Grandpa Mason clouded his lungs for years with nicotine and essentially drowned by emphysema. Mickey Mantle flooded his liver with sugar from alcohol and ended up losing a wife and a life.
I got caught in an electrical storm last month that raged inside my chest. Cardiac arrhythmia, they call it. Don’t think I plugged myself in the wrong socket or anything. Stuff happens. This happened to happen to me.
One minute, I was visiting patients in one hospital, and the next thing I knew, I was an impatient in-patient in another. The world was suddenly turned upside down the way the Andrea Gail was at sea.
My ship righted.
Turns out not to have been the perfect storm, thank God, but it got my attention anyway. Helplessness. Desperation. Prayer. Gratitude. Reminded me how little control we have in the face of cosmic chaos.
No heart disease or heart damage, no plumbing problems, just electrical trouble. The doctor calls it a “condition”: medication for now, a surgical procedure later.
In the meantime, I will have episodes now and then. Episodes? Sounds like “I Love Lucy” reruns, but it’s more like the annoying tone of the Emergency Broadcast Network and that voice – “This is a test, this is only a test… .”
Yeah, well, I don’t know how you grade these kinds of tests. Or how God does. I’m pretty sure being alive means you pass for now. The question is whether you can raise your grade by learning anything through it.
Being awake to life may be the prelude to being awake to God. The good things can tip us off as well as the jolts of the bad – creation’s wonders as well as chaos’ blunders.
The sight of your breath on a cold day; the smell of your sweat on a hot one; the taste of salt on your tongue; the sound of the sea in a shell; the feel of a lover’s hand in yours: all hints of something more.
Jesus is still calming storms. God is still speaking in rainbows. Anybody listening?
