A Quiet Lesson From a Stormed-Out Afternoon

 A Quiet Lesson From a Stormed-Out Afternoon

It started on one of those afternoons when nothing feels steady.

I was sitting by the window, watching the sky turn from blue to grey in a matter of minutes. The wind had picked up, the trees were bending, and everything outside felt restless, unsettled. And somewhere inside me, I felt the same. A little stormy. A little shaky.

I was reading a story Max Lucado shares in Anxious for Nothing.

A father and his young daughter were flying home when the aircraft hit severe turbulence. The child looked up, slightly startled by the shaking plane, but the father sat calmly, even smiling. The daughter asked, “Aren’t you scared?”

He said, “No, sweetheart… the pilot is my friend.”

That sentence stayed with me longer than I expected.

Because so often, anxiety feels like turbulence — sudden, unpredictable, and completely out of our control. The world shakes, our thoughts race, and we instinctively hold on to anything that feels stable. But Max Lucado’s message is simple and grounding: peace doesn’t come from having a smooth flight; it comes from trusting the One who pilots your life.

As I sat watching the storm outside, I realised something. We spend so much time trying to control everything — outcomes, people, uncertainties, the future. And in that tight grip, we create the very anxiety we want to escape from. Lucado repeats, gently, that the goal is not to eliminate all storms. The goal is to anchor ourselves in something steady enough to hold us through them.

And that anchor is not fear. Not worry. Not endless “what-if” scenarios. It’s trust. Its the trust in God who is streeting the world. 

That afternoon, as the rain finally began to fall, the storm suddenly looked less intimidating and more rhythmic — a reminder that not everything loud is dangerous, and not everything uncertain needs to be feared.

And perhaps that’s Lucado’s greatest teaching:

Anxiety may visit, but it doesn’t have to unpack and stay. We can feel the shake without falling apart.

Sometimes all it takes is remembering that the Pilot knows exactly where we’re going.