What's Coming?

Normally, when we get up in the morning we make coffee and open the sliding glass door on one end of our living room/kitchen and a window on the other. It is generally quite pleasant for a couple of hours. This morning is cloudy, so it's a bit cooler (less hot) than usual, and there is just the slightest breeze. Normally, I'd just enjoy the meteorological gift while I check my email and drink my coffee, but this morning the calm feels eery. Somewhere way out my sliding glass door a storm, Mangkhut, is spinning. Already it has wind speeds between 50 and 100 miles per hour. Thus far, since its birth as a tropical depression out near the Marshalls, it has followed a straight path for my front door. I'm not planning to let it in, but, really, there is little I can do. Is the peaceful morning the calm before the storm or just the peace? Mangkhut, like most "natural" phenomena, is unpredictable. It could turn north or south, or unexplainably weaken. Likewise, it could become the Typhoon by which all typhoons ever after will be measured. The only thing I really know is, I don't know. I have a big family, now. We have been, and are taking all the precautions that we should. We have more to do before Mangkhut's predicted arrival on Tuesday. When I woke early this morning, though, I was struck with the thought that I can't "do myself out of this." Really that is always true. It's just that I often don't get it. The apartment where Kathy and I live and some of our other campus buildings are constructed to withstand a Typhoon. Still, they aren't impervious to damage, major or merely nuisance. Another of our main buildings doesn't have the Typhoon Readiness Seal of Approval (Don't try to google that. I made it up.) After the fall, this world so works that everything in it is headed to chaos, "moth and rust corrupt," typhoons blow down. If Mangkhut (is Mangkhut a feminine or masculine name?) continues its, so far, relentless path to my front door, where will our little campus register on the chaos-cosmos (order) scale the day after? Again, file that in the "I don't know folder." So, *   I can't do myself to peace, and *   I can't know myself to peace, so am I just stuck in turmoil? At the point of time just before what might be the greatest cosmic turmoil before, during or after this world's history, Jesus said,   I am leaving you with a gift—peace of mind and heart. And the peace I give is a gift the world cannot give. So don’t be troubled or afraid. (JOHN 14:27)    The way to peace is through trusting, resting in my relationship with the One Who made the ocean, wind, and waves, and the One Who loves me and my much-expanded family more than I can know. The sun is shining now. The breeze has picked up a bit. Will it steadily increase for the next 48 hours or is it just a nice Sunday morning treat? I don't know. I do know God is good, in the storm or in the calm. I'm trusting you, Lord. Please help my unbelief.  It's Something To Think About.