Before you begin reading Max Lucado’s In the Eye of the Storm, the author introduces the reader to a parakeet named Chippie. One day Chippie’s owner decided to clean his cage with a vacuum cleaner. Immediately after the owner had placed the vacuum hose in Chippie’s cage, the phone rang. Poor Chippie never saw it coming! He was sucked into the vacuum cleaner bag. Covered with dust and soot, Chippie got rinsed off with running water. As if that wasn’t enough, the now shivering and wet Chippie got blow-dried with hot air. These days Chippie doesn’t sing much anymore- he just sits and stares.
Max uses Chippie’s story as an allegory for our own storms:
“The life that had been so calm is now so stormy. You’re hailstormed by demands. Assailed by doubts. Pummeled by questions. And somewhere in the trauma, you lose your joy. Somewhere in the storm, you lose your song.”
The author goes on to describe 3 components of life’s storms in this book:
1. the stress of demands- dealing with deadlines and frustrations
2. storms of doubt- why doesn’t Jesus come?
3. the sting of failure- how the hand that saved Peter can touch us.
As Max concludes, in life’s storms Jesus is closer than we ever dreamed.
