In his book In the Eye of the Storm, Max Lucado tells about something that happened to him while he was in high school. Every year, he and his family used to go fishing during spring break. But one year, his brother and his mom couldn’t go, so his dad let him invite a friend.
They looked forward to this vacation with great anticipation. They pictured the sun shining down on them as they sat in the boat in the middle of the lake. The yank of the rod and the spin of the reel as they wrestled the bass into the boat. The smell of fish frying in a skillet over an open fire. They could hardly wait. Finally spring break arrived, they loaded the camper and set out for the lake.
They arrived at night, set up the camper and went to bed anxious to get up the next morning and go fishing. But that night, a northeaster blew through. The wind was so strong they could barely open the door of the camper the next morning. The sky was gray. The lake was choppy. There was no way they could fish in that weather.
"No problem," they said. They could spend the day in the camper. They had brought Monopoly and Reader’s Digest. They knew a few jokes. It wasn’t what they came to do, but they would make the best of it and fish the next day. So they passed the day indoors. The hours passed slowly but they did pass. Night finally came and they crawled into their sleeping bags dreaming of fishing.
The next morning it wasn’t the wind that made the door hard to open, it was the ice! They tried to be cheerful. "No problem," they said. "We can play Monopoly...again. We can reread the stories in Reader’s Digest. And surely we know another joke or two." But they weren’t nearly as cheerful about it all.
And as the day went on, they began to get more and more irritable and edgy. It was a long day and a long night. The next morning, when
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