What Would It Look Like If You Tilted It Sideways?

First off I would like to tell you that...you got weasels on your face.

I was walking home from the basket ball game earlier this evening--I'm in the pep-band as you all know--when I walked by the stream that flows past the High School. It's just a small stream that goes along the side of the road until it ends up in a pond in one corner of the town. It is because of this stream that there are two bridges that serve as exits from the school parking lot. They aren't anything fancy, just slabs of pavement over the little stream.
I was going home after the game when I walked over this bridge. I've walked over it maybe half a million times before--I walk to and from school every day. This time, however, there was something different about this little stream. It wasn't such a little stream any more.
We've been having some really heavy weather lately. It's hasn't been anything uncommon to Oregon, but I guess that the snow on the mountains has been melting as well. All of these things make for the swelling of any body of water within...who knows how many miles.
Anyway, as I was walking over to the bridge, just before crossing it, I looked at the water level. This little stream had almost reached the bottom of the bridge. It was gushing out like a fire hose. I was amazed at how terrifying this lovely brook had become. No longer was it the clear glistening waters I had seen many times in my comings and goings. No more did it sing with the joyful sound of beauty.
Now it was a raging force on a rampage of destruction. It thundered down around its shores with a roar of urgency.
But the strange thing in all this was not the transformation in the stream. Rather, it was the transformation in my perception of the stream. Or, to be more precise, the lack of change in my perception of it. I was looking at a stream that not long before, in my memory, had held all the beauty of nature within it, but now I was looking at something that had no perceivable beauty in it at all. It was a muddy, tumbling, yelling monster. And yet as I was looking upon it I stood in wonder at the beauty I was beholding.
I did think of all the houses that are located along this stream. In the past it has flooded and caused trouble for every one of those houses. I thought about the possible flooding of the entire uptown area, and still I was enthralled by how beautiful this thing was.
But that's how I'm supposed to be. Most Christians should know that as Christians we have nothing to fear in this life. We don't have to be worried by anything because we know that God is in control of everything that happens. We find it really easy to act on this knowledge when things are going great. It's easy to find beauty in the trickling brook. But when the rains come, and the snows melt, and the pleasant stream turns into a roaring beast that would as soon smash anything in its path as do anything else, then we lose sight of God. These are the times when we have a hard time seeing God in our lives.
It would seem as though all beauty had left the stream. In fact there was really no beauty in the stream to begin with. The beauty was in what God was doing with the stream. So why should God's work loose its beauty when the beauty isn't in the stream? We tend to keep our eyes on the stream and not on God's hand. If only we could look at what God is doing with the stream, beauty would be all we could see, even in the disasters and pains of flooding.