Editorial November 13, 2017 Issue

Calming the storm of fearful predictions

Tony Lobl

While a single news item can often feel a little scary, sometimes a series of events appear to point towards a “perfect storm.”

I first came across the phrase when viewing a trailer of the movie by that name, based on Sebastian Junger’s 1997 bestseller. The movie’s images vividly conveyed the perils of being at sea in a “critical or disastrous situation created by a powerful concurrence of factors,” which is how Merriam-Webster defines a “perfect storm.”

The movie came to thought some time later when I was praying about a situation I was facing in the work I was doing. It boasted just that sense of a “concurrence of factors” threatening a calamitous outcome. But as I recalled those perilous nautical images, I found myself rebelling against the whole notion of a “perfect” storm. I (mentally) yelled: “No! Perfection doesn’t belong to evil. Perfection belongs exclusively to God, infinite good. A ‘perfect storm’ is a spiritual impossibility!”

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Bible Lens—November 13–19, 2017