I can’t imagine a situation where the best thing to do is to send a flood, or any disaster, to destroy an entire world. I understand sometimes our lives are in drastic need of reshaping, and massive amounts of destruction are needed to right some wrongs. In order to build anything worth having, sometimes a little excavation is in order.

Surviving a disaster is hard work. Your faith is tested, and your hope is frail. I’m sure when Noah started building his ark he felt like a different person by the time he stepped off on to dry land again. After all, his whole world has changed. Nothing was the way he left it. His life was completely different, and he had to start all over again. Remnants of his former life were the people close to him and the memories of what used to be.

Just building the ark was hard work. Noah had the opportunity to prepare and get used to the idea that his life was going to change. When my son was moving from 1st grade to 2nd grade he loved his teacher so much. He said goodbye to everything in the classroom the last day of school. He knew it was the last time he would see the room exactly like that. What a gift it is to know you are saying goodbye! Humans are professionals at denial. We live in states of it, swim in it, and drink from fountains of it when we just aren’t ready to admit reality to ourselves just yet. I think of denial as our brains way of easing our hearts into what it knew first anyway. Noah had years to prepare. Typically, humans don’t get that long at all. We might get clues our lives are going to change, but odds are when an external force decides to change our world for good or bad we aren’t going to have time to build an ark.

Not everybody made it onto the ark. I’m sure Noah had a lot of friends that he figured out pretty quickly weren’t going to make it into his new life. When it’s time to clean house some people aren’t ready for the change. What a big disaster does tell us is who our real friends are. Noah might have endured a lot of hurt and ridicule before he got on that ark, but that is not specified. Noah’s friends didn’t just delete him off Facebook, unfollow him on Instagram, or stop sending him Snapchats. They died. That is an extreme example, but when a disaster happens in our lives, our friends seem to drop off the face of the earth too. It’s not any less sad to lose a friend to death as it is to indifference.

Enduring the storm isn’t easy either. The storm is real. The storm is loud. As it rages, you are changed. You’ll never be the same person again as you were before the storm. There are days you feel used to the rain. Why would it not be raining? It feels as though it’s supposed to be that way. Some days you start wondering if the storm is making you crazy. After a while you start wondering if the sun will ever come out again.

After the rain stops, it isn’t back to normal. You don’t come out of a storm the same way you were. You just might not recognize yourself. Something happens when you realize it isn’t raining. You allow yourself some hope. You’ve been on this “ark” surrounded by the wild animals of thoughts you have endured. You’ve listened to them day and night. Some gave birth to new thoughts. Some left enormous piles of waste. All were necessary in order to start over after the storm. Without the animals along for the trip the storm wouldn’t have changed us to help us survive what happens next.

That brings me to what happens next, and honestly I have no idea. I know that today I got an olive branch back when I sent out that dove. That branch does not just symbolize life, it is new life. It is hope. It is symbolic of what is to come, and I know whatever it is will be better than what I lost in the storm.