Echos of old fears
I ran through the pouring rain, and when I was seated safely in the dry interior of my car, I found that I was as speckled with rain drops as a dalmation is speckled with spots. I began to drive. In a couple of minutes the rain and wind had picked up considerably. Sheets of rain were pushed sideways by the great gusts of wind. At a stop light I stared at the road, which was one continually moving river a couple of inches deep. Turning one way, I found that I was now driving against the wind and rain. The car ahead of me slowed to a crawl, and I did the same. I flicked my windshield wipers to turn them up another notch but found that they were already going as quickly as they could. The night was pitch black, but the storm was punctuated every few seconds by flashes of lightning and the boom and crack of thunder. The two came at nearly the same time. It was beautiful and terrible, and in my heart there trembled an old fear.
When I was a little girl I happened to read not one but several stories about people being struck by lightening. In those cases, two things always happened: either they died, or they experienced horrible pain and a long hospitalized recovery. I read details such as charred shoes and temporary paralises that played out very vividly in my imagination. Even one story I recall, about a girl who received the shock through the ground of lightning striking a metal fence post a few yards away and having to crawl home because for a time afterwards she was so numb that she couldn't walk, scared me like you wouldn't believe.
But it wasn't just lightning that I was afraid of. The potential of any kind of electric shock made me shiver. Scenes in movies where people get shocked, where they shake and yell and sometimes smell like smoke afterwards? Never funny to me. I hated seeing things like that. The old animated cartoon, "Ben And Me", about a mouse that basically gives Benjamin Franklin the ideas for all his most brilliant inventions? The scene where the mouse is tricked during one experiment to go up in a kite with a key attached during a thunderstorm and gets struck by lightning and comes back buzzing, glowing, and breathing smoke always made me cringe so badly I sometimes left the room. It was only an animated cartoon! But I just couldn't take it.
The fear has lessoned as I've grown older. I know that the chance of my car being struck by lightening is slim, however that doesn't make me feel much better about being in a metal object during a storm. I do admit that lightning is utterly beautiful. It's powerful, uncontrollable, and magnificent. I just appreciate these attributes more from a distance ... or in pictures. It's an old fear that still flutters at the back of my heart, but it's one that I can laugh about now, a thing that I as a serious little girl could never do. I'm thankful that the fear is dissipating slowly and not growing. I think that childhood fears should do that.
"When I was a child I used to speak as a child, think as a child, reason as a child. When I became a (wo)man, I did away with childish things." - 1 Corinthians 13.
I doubt I'll ever get to the point of being a storm chaser, but ... I resolve to keep working on chasing my fears away, because after all this life is so short. It is but a flash like lightning with an echo of thunder. I hope that my life lights up the sky in that way, if only for a moment.
When I was a little girl I happened to read not one but several stories about people being struck by lightening. In those cases, two things always happened: either they died, or they experienced horrible pain and a long hospitalized recovery. I read details such as charred shoes and temporary paralises that played out very vividly in my imagination. Even one story I recall, about a girl who received the shock through the ground of lightning striking a metal fence post a few yards away and having to crawl home because for a time afterwards she was so numb that she couldn't walk, scared me like you wouldn't believe.
But it wasn't just lightning that I was afraid of. The potential of any kind of electric shock made me shiver. Scenes in movies where people get shocked, where they shake and yell and sometimes smell like smoke afterwards? Never funny to me. I hated seeing things like that. The old animated cartoon, "Ben And Me", about a mouse that basically gives Benjamin Franklin the ideas for all his most brilliant inventions? The scene where the mouse is tricked during one experiment to go up in a kite with a key attached during a thunderstorm and gets struck by lightning and comes back buzzing, glowing, and breathing smoke always made me cringe so badly I sometimes left the room. It was only an animated cartoon! But I just couldn't take it.
The fear has lessoned as I've grown older. I know that the chance of my car being struck by lightening is slim, however that doesn't make me feel much better about being in a metal object during a storm. I do admit that lightning is utterly beautiful. It's powerful, uncontrollable, and magnificent. I just appreciate these attributes more from a distance ... or in pictures. It's an old fear that still flutters at the back of my heart, but it's one that I can laugh about now, a thing that I as a serious little girl could never do. I'm thankful that the fear is dissipating slowly and not growing. I think that childhood fears should do that.
"When I was a child I used to speak as a child, think as a child, reason as a child. When I became a (wo)man, I did away with childish things." - 1 Corinthians 13.
I doubt I'll ever get to the point of being a storm chaser, but ... I resolve to keep working on chasing my fears away, because after all this life is so short. It is but a flash like lightning with an echo of thunder. I hope that my life lights up the sky in that way, if only for a moment.
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