Coffee Shop Journal

There’s no doubt about it: Hurricane Ike blew into town today. Clouds went scudding across the sky and the palms are waggling back and forth. To me, the trees all look like they are cheering Hurricane Ike on…”Go get ‘em, Ike!” I resent them because they seem cheery about a hurricane running by in the Atlantic and Gulf.

Seeing the mild but breezy weather made me remember a scene from the old 1950’s game show, “What’s My Line?” David and I enjoy watching this piece of pop culture history because you never know what famous celebrities will be appearing, or what antiquated jobs some of the guests will have. A month or so ago a tall, handsome airplane pilot turned out to be one of the first hurricane hunter pilots. He told the panelists in the interview following his segment that he and his fellow hunters had “discovered” a hurricane 600 miles off the coast of Florida. You see, back in those days radar couldn’t alert us to swirling masses of thunderstorms. Hurricanes could come out of nowhere and surprise those of us silly enough to live on the coast. This early hurricane hunter was greeted like a rock star for possessing the ability to warn us when we were part of a tropical system.  Today as I drove along looking at the gusty, overcast day I remembered that early hurricane hunter. Back then I never would have known that my slightly nasty day was really part of a larger hurricane Ike.

Life in the kingdom is kind of like that, too. When the clouds are scudding along in life, we feel like the miniscule showers of day to day life really have no purpose. They just annoy us. But guess what? Sometimes the thunder storms of life are actually part of a much larger, swirling and whirling weather pattern. They are part of the bigger picture. While we wait for the glamor of “doing something for God” we might be missing the very part he has for us to play.