After the Storm Broke Open the Kansas Sky

Margaret Haines had farmed winter wheat outside Dodge City, Kansas, for thirty-seven years, but the June supercell of 2019 was something else entirely. She stood on her porch and watched the sky turn the color of a bruise — green-black and churning. Then the wind hit. It snapped a sixty-foot cottonwood clean in half like a man breaking a pencil. Lightning struck the fence line three times in rapid succession, each crack so loud it rattled the glass in her kitchen cabinets. Hailstones the size of golf balls hammered the barn roof until the tin sang. Her cattle huddled against the lee side of the windbreak, trembling.

For twenty minutes, the storm owned everything.

And then — silence. The kind of silence that feels holy. The clouds split apart and the evening sun poured through like liquid gold. The fields, parched for weeks, were dark and soaking. The air smelled like wet earth and ozone and something Margaret could only call mercy. She stood there, boots muddy, hair plastered to her face, and whispered, "Glory."

The psalmist understood that moment. Psalm 29 doesn't describe a gentle God. It describes a God whose voice breaks cedars, strips forests bare, and shakes the wilderness of Kadesh. But the psalm doesn't end in destruction. It ends with this: "The Lord blesses His people with peace." The same voice that commands the storm is the voice that speaks peace over your life when the storm passes. The Almighty who thunders is the same God who holds you steady through the shaking.