the storm

I read this last night in "Streams in the Desert" and loved it. It's very applicable to things in my life right now.

"I recollect, when a lad, and while attending a classical institute in the vicinity of Mount Pleasant, sitting on an elevation of that mountain, and watching a storm as it came up the valley. The heavens were filled with blackness, and the earth was shaken by the voice of thunder. It seemed as though that fair landscape was utterly changed, and its beauty gone never to return.

"But the storm swept on, and passed out of the valley; and if I had sat in the same place on the following day and said, 'Where is that terrible storm, with all its terrible blackness?' the grass would have said, 'Part of it is in me,' and the daisy would have said, 'Part of it is in me,' and the fruits and flowers and everything that grows out of the ground would have said, 'Part of the storm is incandescent in me.'

"Have you asked to be made like your Lord? Have you longed for the fruit of the Spirit, and have you prayed for sweetness and gentleness and love? Then fear not the stormy tempest that is at this moment sweeping through your life. A blessing is in the storm, and there will be the rich fruitage in the afterward."

- Henry Ward Beecher