I was just sitting here at 10:something PM thinking about what to make my first “real” post about. All of a sudden it hit. The very heavy, sudden rain – AND – the thought of how much I like to pay attention to the weather.
It’s fascinating to me. The paradox of how a gentle rain can bring a calm, cool, relaxing atmosphere on a Summer Sunday afternoon while you sit on the front porch half awake or how a Spring thunderstorm can sneak up out of nowhere with bolts of lightning dropping like bombs outside your window as you are half asleep in your bed.
Weather seems to have personality. Sometimes it whispers. Sometimes it shouts. And the interesting thing is that the atmosphere almost always gives you clues about what’s coming – if you just pay a little attention.
The air changes. The wind shifts. The clouds start to build in ways that look just a little different than they did an hour before.
Most people don’t notice those things. But once you start paying attention to them, you see patterns. You begin to recognize signals that tell you something is about to change.
It seems that life works the same way.
Big changes rarely arrive completely unannounced. Most of the time there are small indicators first – subtle shifts in circumstances, behavior, or direction that tell you something is developing.
In leadership or management, those signals might show up in the attitude of a team or the culture of an organization.
In technology, they sometimes show up as small glitches or warning signs in a system before a major failure happens.
In relationships, they show up in tone, attention, and the way people interact with each other.
And in faith, they often show up in the quiet nudges that encourage us to slow down, reflect, and pay attention to what God might be trying to show us.
The problem is that most of us live at such a fast pace that we miss the signals.
We wait until the thunder is already cracking overhead before we realize a storm has arrived.
But the truth is that storms – both the literal ones and the ones in life – almost always send advance notice.
You just have to be watching the sky.
We’ll talk more soon.
~NG
