A couple of days ago and out of nowhere a very violent storm hit the city I live in – the city of Ruwais in Abu Dhabi, UAE. It was a feeling like I've never had before. There I was past midnight sitting on my bed watching the water leaking from everywhere into the house and praying that none of my windows get cracked or smashed by the flying debris. I tried my very best to control the water leakage by laying most of my towels behind the door and the windows, however, just to make things more interesting the whole city lost power and there was nothing else that anyone could do but wait for the storm to pass.
The aftermath experienced the next day was beyond
description but there was no time to just stand and look at the damage,
something had to be done to bring life back to normal. For me it was time to
drain the water out of the house, get rid of all damaged items, and restore the
place to its normal condition; it was time for a clean out. What amazed me is
that I found so many items that I didn't need and had totally forgotten about.
At the end of the day and after several hours of draining and cleaning the
house actually looked even better than it did before the storm. Then it dawned
on me; although I had a scary night during the storm, this storm actually did
me good. It gave me the chance to scan through most of my belongings and re-evaluate
what I needed and what I could get rid of to make more space for other items,
and most importantly the house is now cleaner and better equipped for any
future storm since I had my brother install a foam water-blocker by the
entrance to stop any possible leakage in the future.
This storm experience is not far from storms that we
experience in our lives; often times we go through periods of struggle,
difficulties, challenges and hardships. My question to you today is: how do you
react to your storms? Do you let them make you or break you? A common mistake that people may do is to deny
the fact that there are certain storms that we just can’t fight; all we can do
is wait for that storm to pass and then learn from the experience to be better
equipped for the next one.
One remarkable thing that one could see during the storm two
nights ago is that the palm trees as big and majestic as they are, bent with
the wend until they almost touched the ground but when the wend died the went
right up standing tall exactly as they were before the storm. For a moment
during the storm you would think they are about to break, yet they knew exactly
when to bend and when to stand up again.
My friends, there is no shame in letting a storm bend us as
long as we don’t break and stand right up once the storm passes for we may not
beat the storm but each storm will sure deepen our roots in the ground exactly
as it does to a palm tree.
I would like to leave you all with a link to one of my favorite compositions by the one and only...YANNI. This one is called....The Storm:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ICUEVGdiXM
