Windstorm

“For He spoke and raised up a stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea.” – Psalm 107:25

“Lord Jesus if there is anything in my life that I am placing before You I pray that you would bring it crumbing down just like You did to the false God Dagon.”

Some years ago I prayed this prayer and went to bed with no idea how quickly God would answer this prayer.

The next morning as I travelled to work in a crew boat to the salmon farm I worked at, I heard Adam, one of my crew members, calling us on radio. After a quick conversation over the radio we learned that, while it was calm where we were, my farm site was in the middle of a storm. One of our work boats was breaking free of her moorings and Adam needed to learn quickly how to start this vessel to keep her from being thrown up on the beach. None of us could understand how it could be rough at the site, while only twenty minutes away where we were it was calm.

Later, when the site came into view, I’ll never forget what I saw. The channel is about five kilometers across but everything was calm except for the area immediately surrounding my farm site. The water and air around the site was white. It was as if a storm like a small hurricane touched down and whipped up the waves into white froth. I’ve seen a lot of storms in my years on the water but I have never seen a storm set itself up like this in such a small area before.

I spent that morning with my crew securing our boats and equipment and afterwards assessing the damage. We saved the work boat thanks mostly to Adam’s quick thinking but the other damage was pretty extensive. A wooden float in behind the farm was broken and ripped in two. A feed shed broke loose when a shackle was stretched open and a metal bracket was torn from it’s side. During the storm it was heaved up onto a six foot diameter steel mooring buoy and the main beams were broken and half of the building collapsed. One inch metal stanchions that the work boat had been tied to were pulled out straight. I’ve never seen a storm concentrate itself like that and I’d never seen a storm in inside waters that destructive, I knew God had answered my prayer.

God had given me this job. He had allowed me to work my way up into management and I thanked Him by pouring my heart into my job. I was putting it ahead of my family and my relationship with God. I’ve never forgotten this lesson and I’m so thankful that He is a jealous God.

There is another lesson that I learned from this storm that I think is just as important. I look back on what was destroyed in that storm and it was all wood hay and stubble. The floats were old wooden floats that were aging and undersized. The house the staff lived in, the steel cages and nets that held our fish and our boats all safely rode out the storm. What God showed me was that as we go through storms, whether they are of the meteorological sort or not He will remove everything that is not profitable. He doesn’t promise that it will be a painless process. In fact it probably will hurt and more than that it may even test the hardness of our faith.