I have a confession to make: I am a weather nut! Yes it's true - I am one of those people who has enabled The Weather Channel to gain its unprecedented fan base, and am more than a little embarrassed to tell you how many of their weather reporter's names I actually know! Worse yet, I have successfully passed my ideosyncrasy onto my only son. If you ever want to know the forecast for the next 7 days, no matter where you live, just ask him and he can probably tell you!
This preoccupation with the weather hasn't been all bad, though, and recently, as I was observing a gathering storm on the horizon, I made a rather profound observation (at least to me) that you probably had figured out a long time ago: storm clouds are deceptive. Not just with their wind, direction and intensity, but in their very appearance.
Haven't you ever noticed how black a cloud can look when gathering, but how gray it can become when you're in the midst of it? Just what causes this phenomenon? It all lies in whether or not the sun is shining on the cloud. Short version? Only when the sun is shining on the storm cloud can you see how black it really is; apart from the sunshine, even the blackest cloud becomes merely gray (and not nearly so threatening in appearance).
And then God gave me His nearly routine "ah-ha" moment when I realized how much this is like sin in our lives. Take your pick of a growing list of things that are sinful and you'll find that apart from the Light which Christ brings, most of them usually don't look that bad. Gray and questionable maybe, but never black!
But take that same sin and expose it to the Light of Christ and you will instantly see it for what it is: black, dangerous and destructive. So what do we tend to do? A brief glance of the culture around us...even the Christian culture...and it is readily apparent that the easiest thing to do is to surround the black clouds with other black clouds as we attempt to convince ourselves and others that our "cloud" really isn't that bad.
What should we do? Take that black cloud (which by this time is barely gray and certainly not dangerous) and expose it to the Light of Christ. Then see what it looks like! His light will always show it for what it is, and hopefully, with a clear view of our "cloud," we will realize the danger it contains and the importance of getting as far away from it as possible.
Yes, storm clouds can be very deceptive, but only we can be deceived. 2 Corinthians 2 closes with these words, "...for we are not ignorant of his (Satan's) schemes." Don't be fooled by the appearance of those storm clouds. Stay in the Light and you never will be!
