The Eye Of The Storm

Sunday, February 1, 2026

This morning I sit warm in my home.  Outside it is fourteen degrees and there is six inches of snow on the ground.  There is no sound but an old hoot owl calling.  The road is impassable.  It is eerily quiet and calm.  But around me is turmoil.  A couple hundred miles west and tens of thousands of people in Nashville have been without power for a week – in bitter cold.  A little less than a thousand miles north and Minneapolis is in utter chaos.  A few thousand miles east and in Iran thousands are dead at the hands of their so-called government.  The swirl around me only makes the calm and quiet here even eerier. When I was a boy in coastal Texas I went through a hurricane – this is like when the eye passes over you, only global, more violent and with greater consequence.  You live in a flinch awaiting the next disaster.

This week the wife and I finished season 2 of “Landman.”  If you don’t know, it is the latest hot streaming series from Taylor Sheridan.  It is profane, sometimes grossly sexual and falls well short of anything vaguely up to a Christian lifestyle.  But it is also massively entertaining, and as someone who spent his elementary school years in the panhandle of Texas, with a father in the oil and gas business, it feels like home in a way.  It features Billy Bob Thornton playing Tommy Norris – man whose life is, simply, the eye of the storm.  Without spoilers, personally and professionally, Norris’ life is a maelstrom.  But he stands in the center of it, mumbling and cursing to himself, but standing firm, solving problems and fixing things.

Just to make the point absolutely clear in the final episode of season 2 the writers throw in an incident wherein as Norris is driving to a place to solve an earth-shattering crisis, while dealing with yet another on the phone he ends up in the middle of a multi-car pileup without a scratch or dent or injury.  The incident is portrayed as an answer to prayer as the automotive mayhem begins when he dares God to throw one more crisis at him.  It is amusing and oddly instructive.

It reminded me of when Jesus calmed the storm:

That day when evening came, he said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side.”  Leaving the crowd behind, they took him along, just as he was, in the boat. There were also other boats with him.  A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped.  Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?”

He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm.

He said to his disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?”

They were terrified and asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!”

And so I thought about what it means to be a Christian in the current weather/politics and religious maelstrom and was comforted.  There is nothing I can actually do for my friends in Nashville or Minneapolis.  Given the dump of snow I am under I could not get there even if there was.  There is nothing I can do for the slaughtered in Iran save pray and urge the president to act.  I lack Jesus’ power to calm the storm

But I can have faith and rest and rely on God to act appropriately.  Sometimes as Christians that is what we are called to do – to rest, wait and have faith.  The world around me is in chaos and tumult.  But here it is quiet, peaceful and beautiful.  God is at work and all I need is faith.