The Divine Storm.
If you’ve ever been through one, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s when the entire world seems to hate you, and everything goes wrong.
Maybe you lose a partner, or your life insurance at the same time that both of your cars are broken, or a million other impossible moments where everything that can go wrong will, and nothing you do seems to make it better.
You get to the point that every move seems to create more chaos, and you wonder how the world will ever be right again.
And the fear grips your very heart.
Stumbling, almost blind to everything but your fears, you desperately try to make sense of what seems insensible. When the very universe seems determined to bring you down, and you are afraid to make a move for fear of what greater darkness will find you.
Alone, lost, adrift and abandoned, you encounter the moment of the question that can change everything.
Is it falling together, or falling apart?
I went through a divine storm 2 years ago. I can’t tell you all the details of how things fell down, because it sounds insane when I write it out. So many things went wrong, that I remember at one point sitting quietly in the corner of my office at home, and weeping.
I couldn’t understand how so much could happen to one person.
I realize now that it could have been a lot worse, but when you haven’t slept properly for weeks, and have reached your point of exhaustion, things have a way of weighing you down. One of the truths that I live by is that anyone can be broken, and I felt very broken in the midst of my storm.
Yet from amidst the terrible circumstances of my storm, things somehow got better. The denial of life insurance, and the terrible feelings of failing my family translated into the weight loss that changed my world.
The eventual removal of myself from a toxic work environment has translated into an emotional freedom that has allowed me to serve others in ways that I never could have before. This work is a part of that change.
But most of all, the greatest change to come from the storm occurred in my soul. Forced to confront the truths that I had for so long denied, I began a very painful, yet ultimately worthwhile process of change.
The awareness that I had for so long avoided became the only pathway out of the storm, and so I walked, and still walk, that pathway.
And it’s still not easy, but it is the right path.
If you find yourself in the middle of a storm right now, I beg you to keep going. I know how lost you can feel, how truly alone, scared you can find yourself, but if you keep going, you will find answers, and direction, and the strength to take one more step, again and again.
The storm can serve you, if you are willing to confront the truths of yourself and allow it to forge a new you, on an anvil that will forever change your soul.
Keep going my friend. You can do this.
I am here to help.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings