When I began to spend time alone in one of the isolated poustinias, tiny cabins on top of a hill in Combermere, I did not know that there can be fierce electrical storms there in the summertime.

The first time such a storm came up with those powerful bolts of lightning hitting every which way, I grabbed a blanket, crawled into the corner, and covered myself up. That’s what you do in a tornado if you can’t find better safety.

I don’t know if it was the Lord "speaking from the tempest" as we read in the latter part of the Book of Job, but two things came to me. One, tornados do not occur in the Combermere area, and two, I could not return to this poustinia unless I did something about my fear.

So I got up, and ever so slowly, walked right up to the bare windows, and stood face-to-face with the flashing lightning. The thunder rattled the cabin and another lightning bolt cracked across the sky.

I almost went for the blanket and the corner, but Momma Nature had gotten my Irish up—had gotten me angry. I was not going to back down now! I threw the door open, and I walked right out into that storm!

When I stood in the middle of the storm, wrapped in the wind and rain, and the lightning and thunder, all that is in me cried out. "Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" At first, that cry came out of fear, but as I continued to stand there, the fear turned to awe, awe of the incredible power of God.

Once again, Momma Nature had done her job! Humble though she is, she is perhaps the only one "big enough" to convince us of the power and beauty and awe and splendor of a God who is a Person.

After the storm had passed, I was still standing there, unharmed, looking up to the sky and still feeling overwhelmed with awe.

That’s when I suddenly realized that, though I didn’t believe in it, I was still a victim of the contemporary mind-set of the Big Bang Theory. (It is just a theory, you know, albeit an interesting one.)

That theory had seeped deep into my very sense of nature and had slowly robbed it of all those qualities which are meant to bespeak a Person: order, power, splendor, wonder, and purpose. And what was in its place? A rather sterilized cosmic bang! Lifeless. Boring.

This notion of a big bang beginning of creation had become so much a part of my unconscious that even when I read this gospel account of the disciples with Jesus in the storm on the sea of Galilee, it was like reading about the Big Bang in Time magazine.

Ho hum. Big bad storm. Water slopping into boat. Boat kinda sinking. Jesus stops storm. Everyone lives happily ever after. Ho hum.

But if someone had walked up to me as I stood there in the heart of that storm on that hill in Combermere, and with a few words, had suddenly stopped the whole thing—wind and rain, thunder and lightning—I would have been so awestruck that I would have been flat on my face in that wet grass quicker than you could yell, "Tornado!"

But, you see, that’s the whole point. A few words is precisely what got creation started. A Person called all that power and order and beauty and splendor forth out of nothing.

And not only that but now we have the privilege of knowing it was all merely a mild preparation for the biggest cosmic bang ever: God become Man. Compared to that one, the other "Bang" hardly makes a sound!

We already know all this, but it is always good to remember it again.

I am told that many scientists are beginning to consider the "metaphysical" when they think of "big" and "bang," that they are beginning to realize that there is something essential missing from the theory, and that behind it, there has to be something else going on.

Perhaps some of them got caught without warning in a real big storm one day with real lightning shooting across the sky and real wind howling.

Perhaps somewhere in their hearts, they heard something bigger than a bang speak from the tempest. Then when it was all over and calm again, perhaps they began to glimpse a Person who knows us and loves us and sometimes, like an excited Father, even likes to awe us now-and-then.

You never know what is hidden in a simple summer storm, but you won’t see it wrapped up in a blanket hiding in a corner!