It is Coming

Plants stab out of the ground like pincushions spread sporadically about.  We are on a pathway of sand, with short, choppy grass on either side.  Right now, we are still in the sun, in the light, breathing the clean air.  The path of sand leads into the darkness as a stark white against black leading away from here.  But up ahead, the clouds are black and heavy with dust and the nice day won't be nice for long.  If we squint, we can make out a house and road up there is the darkness complete with telephone poles if we look really hard.  But it appears to be fading away as if night has come on early.  The dust storm is coming and all that we can do is find some shelter before it hits.

It is amazing how some times we can see the trouble coming from miles away.  We know that it is coming but we can't avoid it.  We can't make it change its course.  We can't make it just stop and go away.  We can only hunker down and hope for the best.  We may even try to prepare ourselves for it as much as possible, but in the end it is still going to hit and we are still going to be left with the clean up afterwards.  Running from it is almost worst because when it does hit, we are in no way prepared because we were hoping that it would miss just this once.  We were hoping that if we ran far enough and long enough it wouldn't touch us.  In the end though, we are just left tired with a long walk home to clean up the mess it left behind.  Other times, we just pretend that it doesn't exist.  That it isn't coming. That it doesn't hurt to get battered by the sand filled wind.  But then we get hurt even worse because when we finally admit that "Hey!  That just happened!  And to me of all people!"  We now have to clean up our own hurts in addition to the hurts surrounding us.  We may hate these storms of trouble in our lives, but if we successfully avoid all the troubles in life, are we even really living?  Or are we just running away, living a half life while avoiding everything that may cause us the least bit of trouble.