The Weather App I Refresh Eleven Days Before My Daughter's Wedding
My daughter's wedding is eleven days away, outdoors, on a bluff her fiancé's family has used for three generations, and I have opened the weather app on my phone more than a hundred times since the forecast first became visible ten days out. It keeps changing. Sunny, then a chance of showers, then sunny again, then a chance of showers dropped to a lower percentage that somehow worries me more than the higher one did, because by now I have started treating the app itself as an oracle instead of what it actually is, a rough guess made by a computer looking at patterns it cannot fully know eleven days out. I understand this. I check it again anyway, sometimes four times in one evening, as if enough refreshing might change what the sky over that bluff is actually going to do.
I have spent a lot of years trying to manage things I have no real authority over, and it started long before I had a daughter old enough to get married. In my drinking years I told myself I was in control of everything, my job, my marriage, how much I drank, right up until the morning none of that was true anymore and everyone around me had known it for years. Sobriety taught me the hard lesson that I was never steering nearly as much as I believed I was. What it apparently did not finish teaching me is how to sit still in front of an outcome I cannot touch, like the weather over a bluff on a Saturday in October, without reaching for some illusion of control to hold onto in the meantime.
Solomon named the mechanism plainly, long before radar existed to give it a screen to hide behind. "There are many plans in a man's heart, Nevertheless the LORD's counsel—that will stand" (Proverbs 19:21, NKJV). I have a plan. It involves a clear sky, a rented arch with white flowers, and a receiving line that does not have to relocate to a tent at the last minute. My plan is not evil or even unreasonable. It is simply not the authority in the room, and every refresh of that app is a small vote for a throne that was never mine to sit on.
James is more direct with a whole church that had grown comfortable making confident plans about cities they had not even visited yet. "Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit'... whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away" (James 4:13-14, NKJV). I do not know what will happen next Saturday any more than they knew what would happen in that city. James does not leave me spiraling over it, though. He hands me a sentence to actually pray instead of a screen to actually refresh. "For you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we will both live, and do this or that'" (James 4:15, NKJV).
Jesus said something even more direct to people worried about far more basic things than an outdoor ceremony, food and clothing and whether tomorrow would provide either one. "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble" (Matthew 6:34, NKJV). I have been living eleven days ahead of myself all week, borrowing trouble from a Saturday that has not arrived yet and spending today's peace to pay for it in advance.
Here is where my own reasoning runs out completely, because I can recite every one of these verses accurately and still feel my thumb twitch toward that app the moment I set my phone down. Knowing the truth and abiding in it are not the same motion, and only one of them actually quiets anything. The psalmist did not talk himself into stillness through a better argument. He received it as an instruction from outside himself. "Be still, and know that I am God" (Psalm 46:10, NKJV). Still comes first. Knowing follows the stillness rather than producing it. In another psalm he names what that stillness is actually aimed at, not the absence of a weather system, but the presence of a Person. "My soul, wait silently for God alone, For my expectation is from Him" (Psalm 62:5, NKJV).
This is what abiding in the Spirit is actually for on a week like this one. Paul told the Galatians plainly, "If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit" (Galatians 5:25, NKJV), and walking with Him has never required Him to hand me tomorrow's radar map first. Paul also promised the Philippians something that has nothing to do with a forecast resolving in my favor. "Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus" (Philippians 4:6-7, NKJV). Surpasses understanding, because my own understanding was never going to produce a guarantee about a bluff eleven days out. Paul tells the Romans the wider promise sitting underneath even a rained out ceremony. "And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose" (Romans 8:28, NKJV). Not that the rain would stay away. That even the rain would not be wasted.
I deleted the weather app from my home screen last night, not because I stopped caring whether it rains, but because I noticed how much of my evening it had been quietly renting from me without paying anything back. I still glanced for it once out of habit before I remembered it was gone. God is alive tonight, and He already knows exactly which forecast you cannot stop checking. He has a plan for that Saturday, and for you, that was never contingent on a radar map cooperating, and He will never leave you standing there refreshing the screen alone.
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Scriptures used (NKJV): Proverbs 19:21; James 4:13-14; James 4:15; Matthew 6:34; Psalm 46:10; Psalm 62:5; Galatians 5:25; Philippians 4:6-7; Romans 8:28.
I have spent a lot of years trying to manage things I have no real authority over, and it started long before I had a daughter old enough to get married. In my drinking years I told myself I was in control of everything, my job, my marriage, how much I drank, right up until the morning none of that was true anymore and everyone around me had known it for years. Sobriety taught me the hard lesson that I was never steering nearly as much as I believed I was. What it apparently did not finish teaching me is how to sit still in front of an outcome I cannot touch, like the weather over a bluff on a Saturday in October, without reaching for some illusion of control to hold onto in the meantime.
Solomon named the mechanism plainly, long before radar existed to give it a screen to hide behind. "There are many plans in a man's heart, Nevertheless the LORD's counsel—that will stand" (Proverbs 19:21, NKJV). I have a plan. It involves a clear sky, a rented arch with white flowers, and a receiving line that does not have to relocate to a tent at the last minute. My plan is not evil or even unreasonable. It is simply not the authority in the room, and every refresh of that app is a small vote for a throne that was never mine to sit on.
James is more direct with a whole church that had grown comfortable making confident plans about cities they had not even visited yet. "Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit'... whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away" (James 4:13-14, NKJV). I do not know what will happen next Saturday any more than they knew what would happen in that city. James does not leave me spiraling over it, though. He hands me a sentence to actually pray instead of a screen to actually refresh. "For you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we will both live, and do this or that'" (James 4:15, NKJV).
Jesus said something even more direct to people worried about far more basic things than an outdoor ceremony, food and clothing and whether tomorrow would provide either one. "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble" (Matthew 6:34, NKJV). I have been living eleven days ahead of myself all week, borrowing trouble from a Saturday that has not arrived yet and spending today's peace to pay for it in advance.
Here is where my own reasoning runs out completely, because I can recite every one of these verses accurately and still feel my thumb twitch toward that app the moment I set my phone down. Knowing the truth and abiding in it are not the same motion, and only one of them actually quiets anything. The psalmist did not talk himself into stillness through a better argument. He received it as an instruction from outside himself. "Be still, and know that I am God" (Psalm 46:10, NKJV). Still comes first. Knowing follows the stillness rather than producing it. In another psalm he names what that stillness is actually aimed at, not the absence of a weather system, but the presence of a Person. "My soul, wait silently for God alone, For my expectation is from Him" (Psalm 62:5, NKJV).
This is what abiding in the Spirit is actually for on a week like this one. Paul told the Galatians plainly, "If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit" (Galatians 5:25, NKJV), and walking with Him has never required Him to hand me tomorrow's radar map first. Paul also promised the Philippians something that has nothing to do with a forecast resolving in my favor. "Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus" (Philippians 4:6-7, NKJV). Surpasses understanding, because my own understanding was never going to produce a guarantee about a bluff eleven days out. Paul tells the Romans the wider promise sitting underneath even a rained out ceremony. "And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose" (Romans 8:28, NKJV). Not that the rain would stay away. That even the rain would not be wasted.
I deleted the weather app from my home screen last night, not because I stopped caring whether it rains, but because I noticed how much of my evening it had been quietly renting from me without paying anything back. I still glanced for it once out of habit before I remembered it was gone. God is alive tonight, and He already knows exactly which forecast you cannot stop checking. He has a plan for that Saturday, and for you, that was never contingent on a radar map cooperating, and He will never leave you standing there refreshing the screen alone.
---
Scriptures used (NKJV): Proverbs 19:21; James 4:13-14; James 4:15; Matthew 6:34; Psalm 46:10; Psalm 62:5; Galatians 5:25; Philippians 4:6-7; Romans 8:28.
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