Hurricane Sandy

We have had a tremendous amount of rain so far this summer. It has brought to mind that old phrase "Don't tell God how big your storm is, tell your storm how big your God is". I guess until this point I had considered that phrase something I would use to provide comfort in difficult situations. Thinking of the storm in the proverbial sense as opposed to the real sense. However, yesterday it was a real storm that once again brought this phrase up for me. Tropical storm Chantal blew through Haiti closing the government Thurs and Fri. Yes, my friends here we are again on storm delay. The last big delay we had due to a storm was Hurricane Sandy last fall. Grace's birth mother made the 18 hour journey to Port Au Prince during the storm for her birth parent interview. She was late, then rescheduled. As if that were not bad enough, the storm killed the cell service and they could not locate her for weeks. Even when our coordinator sent a man to get her he brought back the wrong woman. Yes, God was bigger than that storm. Despite the delays, He overcame and got that birth parent interview done.

As I was thinking about this today in an attempt to remind myself last week's storm was not fatal, something else dawned in me. Hurricane Sandy was more than my adoption delays in my life. It was the realization that Grace's mother is so committed to her future she would walk through a hurricane to give her away. As if the pain and tragedy of losing her daughter was not hard enough, the vision of her walking through this storm all those hours was downright humbling to me. Sandy was not done yet in my life though. Today I spent the afternoon with Jack. We picked out snacks, sunscreen, insect repellant and various other things. He leaves in one week to go to Rockaway Beach Island to continue the clean up efforts after Hurricane Sandy there. It is his first mission trip. To think of God working in him as a result of the same storm was a bit overwhelming to me as well. I began to wonder if maybe this phrase was not accurate at all. Maybe it was not about God versus the storm at all, but really how big God is in the storm that matters.