Vantage points
On seeing the storm and being seen in it
Over the weekend, as the heat increased towards early afternoon, the steady morning stream of customers in the farm store ebbed. Those final stragglers that popped in for produce apologized that I had to be without air-conditioning on such a hot day. Although the sun was unforgiving, the temperatures were actually improved from the day before. The farm hands finished pulling bush beans and left around noon. Suddenly I found myself entirely alone.
I busied myself re-organizing a few things, eating some lunch, jotting down a few notes for later. Bird calls provided the only interruption to the constant whirring of greenhouse fans. Looking outside, I realized the sky was changing. Clouds were coming in, and not fluffy white ones. They were long and strange, stretched under waves of a wind current I could not yet feel.
A few minutes later, I looked outside again. Just above the distant trees I saw an ominous darkness rapidly approaching. I stepped out the open garage-style door to watch. The transition away from broad daylight was swift. Low clouds tinted with purple and green rolled quickly over me; a sudden cool wind whipped through the trees. Captivated, I pulled out my phone to take a picture, and immediately a wall of gravel dust was hurled into my eyes as fat raindrops began to fall.
I fled inside as the a-frame chalkboard retreated noisily to the wall and wall-hangings flapped helplessly in the wild wind. The deluge began. I shut the garage door and started to close down the store. Sheltered from the sheets of rain, I smelled the drenched soil, and heard the thunder roll just outside. I felt small and safe in there, and like I was the only one seeing this beautiful moment of raw power. Was anyone else seeing this? I only had my vantage point.
My completed “closing checklist” coincided with a slight lessening of wind and rain. I ran to my car and drove out the gate, stopping to lock it behind me. The lock was wet and slippery, and my fingers fumbled to connect it correctly. Just beyond the field I saw lightning strike a tree. The thunderclap was instant— a threefold craaack that reverberated terror through me. A childhood memory surfaced of my older brother reading statistics from the Guinness Book of World Records about the person who survived the most lightning strikes (I think it may have been seven). Just one would be more than enough to finish me, I thought. And then, is locking this gate worth me losing my life? No one else got to see that from my vantage point either.
A few days later, I was holding my two-month-old niece as she slept. She opened her eyes— pupils and limbs swung erratically from side-to-side as she searched for something to focus on. Suddenly, she locked onto my eyes, and the pendulum stopped swinging. She became quiet, anchored in being seen. What was that like from her vantage point? She moved quickly from a frantic perception of aloneness to a still and contented communion.
Turns out she was teaching me about myself. I too panic when I become aware of the chaos of life crashing around, and I too am confined to the particularities of my embodied perceptions. If I give my baby niece grace for how little she sees, how much more does the Lord show to me? If I see her, with all my imperfect-but-attentive love, how much more are we both being seen?