The Day the Storm Comes Back Around

Every season it comes back on the television.

They use the same footage. She could describe it to you frame by frame. The palm bent flat, the water coming up over the road by the bait shop, the woman in the yellow slicker shouting something the microphone does not catch. And then the graphic with the date on it, big white numbers, and the anchor saying the words three years ago today in the voice they use for that.

Her brother was in that water.

He was thirty one. He went out to move a boat that was not even his, for a man who had done him a favor once, and the whole thing took about forty minutes from the time he left the house.

So now there is a week, every single season, when her worst day is content. It is a retrospective. It is a look back. It is the local station running the anniversary package, and the radio doing a segment, and somebody at work saying, hey, did you see they were talking about the storm.

Nobody at that job knows. She has been there two years and it never came up and now it cannot come up, because the moment to say it passed a long time ago and saying it now would make it a whole thing.

So she keeps her face ordinary. She says, yeah, I saw a bit of it.

And here is what she cannot say to anybody. She watches it. Every year. She sits down and she watches the whole package, the palm and the road and the woman in the slicker, all the way through, and she does not know why, and afterward she cannot sleep and she is angry at herself for putting it on.

And the other half is worse. Some years she cannot make herself turn it on at all, and then she feels like she has left him out there by himself.

Three seasons of that now. And the date is coming round again in eleven days, and there is a promo for it already running between the shows.

If anybody has kept their face ordinary at a desk like that, stay with me. There is one verse in Nahum that is going to take something off the whole week.

The stronghold is on the day, not on the weather

Nahum is a short book about a storm of a different kind, and right in the middle of it there is a sentence people put on cards without noticing where it is sitting.

The LORD is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him.Nahum 1:7

Look at where that verse is placed. Two verses earlier the mountains are quaking and the hills are melting and the earth is burning at His presence. The prophet is describing weather that would take a coastline apart. And then, in the middle of that, a stronghold in the day of trouble.

Not instead of the day of trouble. In it.

The verse does not say the storm gets called off. It does not say the footage stops running or that the local station finds something else that week. It says there is a strong place standing inside a day like that, and it says who it is.

You are inside a stronghold during that week of coverage, and you were inside it in the forty minutes it took, before you knew anything at all. Nahum 1:7 is the written word putting a strong hold in the day of trouble rather than at the far end of it, and the Spirit who breathed that verse is in the room when the promo runs between the shows.

And then the second half of it, which is the part that lands hardest on a woman with an ordinary face at a desk. He knoweth them that trust in him.

Knows. Not watches. Not assesses. The word is the one for knowing a person all the way through, and it is set right against the storm on purpose. The mountains quake and He knows exactly who is standing in it.

You are known all the way through by God on the day that date comes up, and you were known on every one of the three that have already gone by. Nahum 1:7 says plainly that He knoweth them that trust in him, and the same Holy Spirit is not fooled for a second by a face kept ordinary in an office.

Watching it and not watching it are both allowed

Now the thing that has been eating her, and I want to name it exactly.

There are two accusations running, and they contradict each other, and she has been carrying both at the same time.

The first one says a healthy person would not sit down and watch that package every year. It calls it picking at it. It says she is doing something to herself on purpose.

The second one says that the year she could not turn it on she abandoned him. It says she looked away from the one thing that still says out loud that it happened.

Both of those cannot be true. Neither of them is.

Here is what is actually happening. She is a woman whose brother died in public. Most people's worst day belongs to them. Hers is on file, with footage, with a date graphic, and the town replays it every season for reasons that have nothing to do with her. That is a strange and specific thing to carry, and there is no correct way to carry it.

Watching it is not self harm. Some part of her is going out to the water every year to be with him for eleven minutes and there is nothing sick in that. And not watching it is not desertion. He is not in the footage. He was never in the footage. The footage is a palm tree and a road and a woman in a slicker.

You are not on trial in that week, and you were never entered as a witness in anybody's account of that storm. Nothing in the whole written word makes a mourner's relationship to a news broadcast a measure of her love or her faith, and the Spirit of God is not watching the six o'clock with a clipboard in His hand.

Nobody gets to tell you how to spend that week

Now I have to keep my hands off it, because the help would be the harm.

I am not going to tell anybody what to do with those eleven days.

Turn it on. Do not turn it on. Unplug the whole thing and go and sit on the dock. Tell the woman at the next desk. Do not tell her. Take the day off. Work straight through it and be glad of the noise. Every one of those is a real thing a real person does, and every one of them, handed over as advice, turns that week into a task with a grade on the far side of it.

And I want to say this plainly, because it is the part people skip. If she does nothing at all, that is not a failure. If the date passes and she works a full shift and eats her supper and goes to bed and does not mark it in any way, that has taken nothing away from her brother. There is no ritual owed. There is no minimum. A woman who lets the day go by without ceremony has not forgotten anybody.

You are free in that week in a way nobody at that job will ever think to tell you that you are. Romans 14:5 leaves the keeping of a day to a person's own mind before God and gives nobody else a vote, and the Holy Spirit does not overrule a sister's own conscience about her own brother.