Surviving The Storms of Life

By Archbishop Helen Esuene

In this life, storms will definitely come. There is no life without storms. Life itself is both storms and pleasantries; you cannot have it just one way, there is always a pleasant period, there is always a period of stress, and so we need to know how to manage our storms when they come.
Storms come in different ways, storms can be sicknesses, ailments that linger for some time, or that are very traumatic. Storms can be emotional distress, relationships and lack of progress in life.

When you look around yourself, and you find out that your mates have all aspired and gone to higher levels, and you are still where you were, storms can be frustrations in the place of work, frustrations in relationships. Storms can be poverty; it can come like spiritual attacks that you do not know what to do.

You go to the hospital, you don’t have any relief, and the problem is still there. Storms can present themselves as near-success syndrome, some storms can come in the form of false accusations, people have been falsely accused and jailed. Storms can present themselves as barrenness or childlessness.

Storms can also present themselves as a loss of a beloved one, the loss of a friend, the loss of a sibling.
So storms can come in many ways, but will storms come? Yes, surely they will come, and it is left for us to know and understand how to manage the storms when they come.

The effects of storms are very clear, they bring sadness, they bring disappointments. Some lead to bitterness, maybe somebody has played a hard nut or deprived you of something valuable, or somebody has made wrong accusations against you, and you find yourself in a position that you cannot even defend yourself.

EFFECTS OF STORMS

Loss of confidence
Effects of storms can present themselves as loss of self-confidence, because it becomes so stressful, it becomes so traumatic that you start to doubt yourself. “It’s like I’m not good enough,” “It’s like I don’t know how to do these things…”, you start to doubt yourself.

Depression
Effects of storms can present themselves as disillusionment, sometimes depression, and the depression can lead to so many other types of illnesses, sometimes it leads to suicide. Storms can make us sick, the storm itself can result in various sicknesses, because during the storm, if you do not manage yourself well, the body is perpetually in a very negative state and when the body is in a negative state, it gives vent to all forms of sicknesses.

Retrogression
Storm effects can lead to retrogression because when you start to doubt yourself, when you start to lose your self-confidence, the things that you normally do well, you find yourself not able to do them, you find yourself doubting your capacity.

Trauma
The effects of storms can present themselves in various ways and when we do not know God, storms will last longer and will be more traumatic because our anchor is on the Lord. So when we don’t have that anchor and the storms come, we fret.
Sometimes we go looking for solutions in the wrong places and further compound the problem but when we have faith in God, we can look up to him from whence cometh our help and we can ask that he sends us help. We can ask for direction, we can ask for solution, we can ask for help.

Complications
Whatever that storm is, there is somebody in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ that we can always refer to and open our hearts to for solutions, and when this is absent in any human being, the storm becomes complicated and more complicated. Other storms come in to complicate the original storm.

SKILLS IN MANAGING YOUR STORMS

Will storms last for a very long time? It might last longer if we do not manage the storm well. The duration of the storm depends largely on how we manage the storm. Storms can come and go, their duration will depend largely on our perception of it. How we perceive the storm will determine how we manage ourselves through the storm.
Two people can have a similar experience and one person quickly gets a hold of himself or herself and moves on, the other person sits there, languishes, grumbles, accuses someone else and does all the negative things. He or she will stay in that storm for a much longer time.

How we rise above our storms will depend largely on our perception, how we see the storm; and how we see the storm will determine how we manage it.
The way we see our storms, is oftentimes not the way God sees them, because we are just looking at the now. We are just looking at our comfort or discomfort, we are just looking at the frustration that we are experiencing, we are not seeing the future and what tomorrow will be.

However, the way God sees things is absolutely not the way we see things. Isaiah 55:8-9 says, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than yours and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
When we go through storms, the best approach is not to look at how we feel but asking God what to do, how to do, and when to do it, because he sees the now and the tomorrow.

We only see the now but when we depend completely on our emotions, then we can miss it because when we are going through a storm, what affects us mostly is our emotions, the way we feel, our feelings about that particular aspect. Whether it’s sickness, whether it’s disappointment, whether it’s a loss, all these are emotions and emotions can be very strong if we don’t rein them in; we need to be able to rein them in.

Life-changing lessons
When we look back at some of the storms in our lives, we know that they offered us some life-changing lessons. It’s funny because on one hand, they were negative to us, they affected our emotions negatively, but with hindsight now, we now see that, ‘Oh, there was something good about that, about what had happened at that time!”

Meanwhile, because we couldn’t see the future, we didn’t perceive it. So, when we are facing storms, we should step aside a bit and ask; are there lessons to be learned in this situation that I’m facing? Is there something I should have done that I didn’t do? Is there something I have missed out somewhere along the line?

Do Self-analysis
We should be able to take introspective look within ourselves, we should be able to take a personal audit of the spirituality of our lives to ask, “Did we go wrong at a particular point or not?”
Before we start to blame other people, before we start to grumble; grumbling does not help and will not solve matters, we need to look at facts. We need to look at issues in a very factual manner and put aside whatever our emotions are playing on us.

We need to look at it very well; for example, if people don’t like you when you go to a place, then there’s something wrong. Instead of blaming people, ‘Oh, so-so-so doesn’t like me, oh, so-so-so is wicked… It’s sometimes good to step back and appraise yourself. How am I doing? I’m I courteous to people? Do I speak to people nicely? What is it that is offensive that people are pushing back when they see me? So it’s always good to do that self-analysis because somewhere along the line, you may pick up something.

Also, there are some storms that is asking for a review of whatever we are doing, a review of whatever actions that we’ve taken. There are some storms like that, you need to do a review. For instance, you were doing this way; but is that the best way to do it or should you do it differently? So there is an analysis and evaluation that should be carried out.

How Joseph managed his storms
The story of Joseph in the Bible readily comes to mind. This is a child that was so loved by the father, and all his siblings knew that the father loved him very much but this is a child that now ended up being sold into slavery by his own brothers. What can be more traumatic than that? That your very brothers could play such an act of wickedness on you but when we read his story in the Bible, from Genesis 39: 2, you’ll see that Joseph was not bitter, Joseph did not lose focus, and he did not try to pay back wickedness on anybody.

There are some people that will say, ‘Oh, I suffered wickedness, I must also make it out to others.’ This is not right, two wrongs don’t make it right.
But Joseph was himself, he was very focused, was honest, and he had integrity. Joseph was faithful and righteous in his dealings with people, whether it was in the prison or in Potiphar’s house or after, he was a righteous person, which is why God favoured him with the knowledge to interpret dreams.

God will always arise on your behalf when you tow the right path. He will not leave you in your storms for too long, he will work out a way for you. For Joseph, his ability to interpret dreams came from God directly, otherwise, how would he have been able to interpret Pharaoh’s dream? He wouldn’t. So, we should stay right and we should stay focused on God “from whence cometh our help.”

Archbishop Helen Esuene

BENEFITS OF STORMS
I had mentioned earlier that looking back at some storms in my life, I realized that there were some benefits; there were some good things about it. There were some good lessons to be learned that helped me later in life. So, are storms without benefits or are there benefits? Let us look at some benefits that storms have. Storms, though traumatic and depriving us of our joy and peace of mind, are not completely negative.

Potential for growth
Storms have potentials for growth, It’s funny, but it is true. There are some storms that enable you to think and then you grow, you now realize some things that you didn’t realize before and that leads to a higher level. It now leads to you rising above your previous level.

So storms have potentials for growth, if we look at them properly and manage them well. Storms make us to think out of the box, you think beyond what you were thinking before, you think out of the box and in thinking out of the box, it leads us to discover hidden latent potentials. It leads us to realize other ways of doing things that we didn’t realize before because we were on a plateau, there were no storms.

Closeness to God
Storms can push us to be closer to God; they are sometimes God’s way of attracting our attention. God sometimes uses traumas, storms to attract our attention, that’s why sometimes people get converted in the prison because that is the only place that they could submit. It’s not pleasant, but that is what sometimes happens. The person would have been spoken to many times and he wouldn’t listen, when he faces the hardship and the deprivation and everything, he now turns around.

So God uses storms sometimes to attract our attention to him. The story of Jonah is very clear; he was running away from God into the boat, that incident in the boat it is very pertinent to note; it was Jonah himself that told the occupants of the boat that he was their trouble, that they should throw him into the sea. It wasn’t as if the people were eager to destroy him, it was himself who said, “throw me into the sea, I’m your problem.” So storms can be activities that bring forth a new birth in our lives. We should look at storms with a different eye whenever we have them.

Archbishop Senator Helen Esuene is the National Overseer of the Ministry of Repentance and Holiness.