A few weeks ago a severe ice storm hit the Great Toronto Area (GTA), and it have left millions of dollars in property damage. Myriads of trees were broken down and thousands of residences suffered an extended power outage. A friend told me that his family stayed over at the local school until the power came back. Many people had the experience that they could not do much about the power being out. At the same time they realized how much modern life depends on electric power in so many ways. Thanks be to God that there was no loss of human life.
With my own eyes, I saw ice covered drive ways, roads, fields and everywhere due to freezing rains for a couple of days. With the glazing of ice a couple of inches thick, the catastrophe of the ice storm was beyond my imagination. How terrible and fearful it was! Ice was everywhere, iced roofs, iced cars, iced rivers and iced trees. Among many different types of storms, such as wind storms, snowstorms, hail storms and so on, an ice storm has its own unique power and potency to destroy nature and bring a lot of property damage in ways that are different from other storms. It was my first experience to hear and see an ice storm disaster. Once again it was proven how vulnerable and weak we human beings are in the face of the power of nature!
A couple of days later, while I was walking on the side of the road, I saw a great amount of damage to the trees. Some trees were completely blown down, some had parts of branches torn off, and some were quite alright. It was interesting to note that among all the damage, some trees were completely all right. Those trees had survived without any harm or injury by the ice storm. I have learned that those trees were either soft and flexible enough to bend down to the ground when weighed down by the weight of ice or strong enough to sustain them under the weight of the ice. Those were neither flexible enough to bend their branches down to the ground nor strong to withstand the weight of ice, had got damaged by the ice storm.
On our life journey, it is impossible to avoid or escape from our storms of life that come to us from time to time in many different forms. However, how deal with a storm in one's life may be a totally different story depending on each person's response and acceptance. A valuable lesson for me from the ice storm in the GTA was that humility and strength are the key elements to deal with any and every kind of our own life storm. The Bible said, "Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall" (Proverbs 16:18). Until spring comes and always, why don't we practice being humble enough to accept our life storm when it is beyond our control and being strong enough to confront it when we must deal with it?
