A Perfect Storm

You turned my wailing into dancing; you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, that my heart may sing to you (Psalm 30:11-12, NIV).

There had been a problem in the reprinting of a devotional booklet of mine, and I had been all bent out of shape for days now over what to do about it. I couldn’t decide if I was being too fussy or only being reasonable. Greg and I were sitting on the couch, and he was trying to talk me through it. (What a saint he is!) The main stress, beyond the thought of having to confront the printer who had done the job, was to decide if I should ask her to absorb the loss of the reprint.

“If it’s that important to you,” said Greg, “just pay to have it redone.” (This is one of his standard solutions to a problem: throw money at it, whether it’s in the budget or not. Easy for him to say—he’s not the tightwad in the family.)

“It’s not fair,” I protested. “If I paid twice for this job, do you know how much I would make on the sale of each booklet? As it is, I practically write for nothing anyway. I want my work to be validated, and that’s one of the ways this world validates work—with money!”

I was on the verge of tears, and he knew it. I excused myself to get a Kleenex before the storm broke. Found the box of tissues on my desk in the kitchen. I picked up the whole box, just in case. As I did, I noticed a card that I had received earlier from someone who was reading the devotional series. That note had been a tremendous blessing to me, seeing how God was moving in someone’s life through something I had written. I quickly re-read it, and the tears came then, in a torrent. I had been paid in full by the Lord, just in that single note, for my many hours of writing and editing.

I returned to Greg, holding Kleenex to my streaming nose and eyes, suddenly too overcome to speak. Joy and gratitude had collided now with my frustration and anxiety, subjecting me to a whirlwind of emotions. I leaned back into the couch, put my head back, and started to sob. But I was arrested by the awful, helpless look of concern on my dear husband’s face. I forced my constricted throat to speak, briefly and hoarsely: “It’s okay—I’m happy now.” Then the sobbing took over again. My goodness, this was quite a storm.

He leaned toward me from the other couch, elbows on his knees, chin in his big hands, watching me intensely. “You’re happy . . .” he said carefully. He said it like a statement, but it was definitely a question. “I see . . .” He paused. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing. “Would you like to tell me what you’re so happy about?”

I had a fleeting thought—that God should present every man embarking on marriage with a manual on women, entitled something like “When Your Wife Doesn’t Make Sense.” The humour in the situation enabled me to get a handle on my emotions enough to speak again: “What’s the matter? Don’t you understand me?” And then we both started to laugh.

I told him what God had shown me in the brief seconds I had been out of the room. The storm was over now: my words had quit blowing and the tears had stopped falling. The recognition of God’s goodness and His sovereignty shone in my soul like sunshine, and we both sat basking in the warmth of it.

Then [Jesus] arose, and rebuked the wind and the raging of the water: and they ceased, and there was a calm (Luke 8:24).