Sabbath Devotional :: Facing the Storm Together

Image credit: PBS video, John Lewis’ Childhood

It’s Valentine’s week, so let’s kick off this devotional with a little love story, shall we?

Not the romantic kind of love, but a love just as deep and resonant. The type that requires bravery and commitment and trust. And also holding hands. (You’ll see.)

You may have heard this one. It’s a story that John Lewis, the late civil rights icon and former Georgia senator, shared about his childhood. When he was young, his father, who had been a sharecropper with his mother, purchased a swath of land in rural Alabama to settle on. At times, large storms would gather, and John would watch wide-eyed as lightning struck the land, sometimes starting fires in nearby fields and once striking — and obliterating — a tree right before his eyes. The power and intensity of it all terrified him.

One afternoon, he was outside playing with more than a dozen other children when the skies darkened suddenly. He felt that old familiar fear rise up in him. His aunt, the only adult around, ushered the children into their home. Together, they stood silent, listening to the crackling lightning and winds violently whip against the walls of the small home. Then it got worse. I’ll let him take it from here:

“Now the house was beginning to sway. The wood plank flooring beneath us began to bend. And then, a corner of the room started lifting up.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. None of us could. This storm was actually pulling the house toward the sky. With us inside it. That was when Aunt Seneva told us to clasp hands. Line up and hold hands, she said, and we did as we were told. Then she had us walk as a group toward the corner of the room that was rising. From the kitchen to the front of the house we walked, the wind screaming outside, sheets of rain beating on the tin roof. Then we walked back in the other direction, as another end of the house began to lift.

“And so it went, back and forth, fifteen children walking with the wind, holding that trembling house down with the weight of our small bodies.”

Can you imagine it? These brave little ones, led by their aunt and bound by trust, walking hand in hand straight toward what they feared most? I’m reminded of Eve after giving Adam the forbidden fruit, taking his hand and walking resolutely into a fallen world. Or the Jaredites stepping together into divinely lit barges and then out onto the vast and unforgiving seas. How were they able to keep putting one foot in front of the other?

I think it was love. Love for each other, love and yearning for home, love for God and the strength that brings. Love that inspires fierce protection and immediate action. Fear might have sent John and his cousins out the back door and their home through the sky. Fear would have kept Eve trapped in Eden forever. Fear might have stopped the Jaredites from ever finding their promised land.

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of love, and of power, and of a sound mind.

Do you, like me, sometimes feel like you’re facing an impossible situation? Something so big, so out of your power to change, that all logic tells you to run the other way? I guess I’m here to say that Love is there for you too. That love is multiplied and magnified when we reach out and connect with others who are facing the same storms, even if in different ways. That when we stand together, really just children in God’s sight, led by One who loves us more than we fully comprehend, we can begin the work of creating our own promised lands.

“Remember that you are spirit daughters of the most creative Being in the universe,” Elder Uchtdorf reminds us. “The more you trust and rely upon the Spirit,” — and I’d add, the more you connect richly with your community! — “the greater your capacity to create. That is your opportunity in this life and your destiny in the life to come. Sisters, trust and rely on the Spirit. As you take the normal opportunities of your daily life and create something of beauty and helpfulness, you improve not only the world around you but also the world within you.”

I’ll close with this last reflection from John Lewis about that stormy day from his childhood. “It seemed that . . . at the height of the civil rights movement, America itself felt as if it might burst at the seams — so much tension, so many storms. But the people of conscience never left the house. They never ran away. They stayed, they came together, and they did the best they could, clasping hands and moving toward the corner of the house that was the weakest.

“And then another corner would lift, and we would go there.

“And eventually, inevitably, the storm would settle, and the house would still stand.”

It’s my prayer that as we seek the guidance of the Spirit, we’ll be led hand-in-hand with our sisters and brothers to the weakest corners, with creativity in our sights and love in our hearts. To which corners do you find yourself being led?