Hello Hurricane

I am a terrible musician, but I love music.  Without a doubt, music is one of my passions.  It relates to others in a way that is unlike any other medium of expression.  The music we listen to becomes the soundtrack of our life.  Through the good and the bad, the highs and lows, music plays an essential role in capturing life’s moments and encouraging us to hold fast to hope.  For me, no other musical group has done this with such distinction than the alternative rock band, Switchfoot.  Each song is a bold statement of purpose and hope.

We all go through storms in life.  We all face storms in the forms of challenges, adversity, and hardship.  For many of us, the storms of life are concrete, physical storms.  I was reminded of this just this past week as Hurricane Sandy swept through the northeastern United States.  Seeing families’ houses flooded, damaged, and even destroyed is immensely difficult to watch.  The catastrophic toll the storms of nature can have on society is devastating, especially as we recognize the life changing and uprooting effects they have on the lives of people.

This week’s events brought me back to one of my favorite Switchfoot songs- a song entitled “Hello Hurricane”.  It’s a song about hope, about singing into the storm as front man Jon Foreman declares, “Hello Hurricane, you’re not enough.  Hello Hurricane, you can’t silence my love.”  It is certainly a lyric to which everyone can relate to some degree.  For those in the northeast, it is an especially heartfelt, triumphant  declaration of purpose and hope.

Trusting in a God who allows what He hates to accomplish what He loves, we can have hope amidst the storms of life.  We can sing with joy and confidence knowing that this is not the end of the story.  As Jon Foreman puts it, “The storms of life might take my house, my loved ones, or even my life- but they cannot silence my love.”