I Baptize You

Another named storm headlines the news. Some years we’ve run out of letters from the English alphabet and have had to move on to the Greek alphabet. And those are only the storms that make it to the majors. Plenty of other storms create their own level of havoc without names. We, in the path of the storms, know something about cedars breaking, oaks whirling, and floods covering.

At the same time, modern technology gives us another view of storms. We can see them from above. The bigger the storm, the more majestic it appears. My first big storm was Hurricane Hugo (1989). Hugo was a beauty. The satellite images showed a perfectly formed eyewall, with interior solid cloud sheets giving way to spiral bands that stretched across five hundred miles. The heavenly perspective of a hurricane.

The storm’s maker loves it. The storm is a thing of beauty, calling Lebanon to “skip like a calf, and Sirion like a young wild ox.” The storm from above is a playground. “And in [the] temple all say, ‘Glory!’”

Perspective is everything in most of life. If we see the Red Sea from the shore, it looks impassable; from above it needs only a small path of dry land between two water walls. If we see thousands of people (five thousand men plus women and children) waiting for food, it looks hopeless; from above they need only a few loaves and fishes to create abundance. If we see a pool of water, a font, maybe a river, at eye level, it looks ordinary; from above it evokes new life with only three words: “I baptize you.”