Whether we have an “Alas!” Or an “Alleluia!” Depends on our perspective.

Not long ago, I awoke early in a hotel in another city and turned on the weather report. I was returning home from a speaking engagement, and the forecast was troubling. Violent storms. Strong winds. Lightning. Arriving at the airport, I glanced at the menacing sky with foreboding. The clouds were iron gray and angry.

We took off with a sharp ascent, and the plane pierced the clouds and leveled off at a high altitude above them. The scene was breathtaking. Bright and majestic and peaceful and glorious-mountains of sunlit clouds rising and falling below me as far as eye could see. They were the same clouds, but my perspective was different. Storms, I realized, look different from the upper side.

Colossians 3:1-3 tells us, “If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

If wisdom, as someone said, is seeing things from God’s point of view, praise is the natural reaction to that

So whether you are on the upper side or the underside of the storm, whether you are on the east bank or the west bank of the Red Sea, God will make a way.

And as He does, don’t forget to praise Him.

Robert J. Morgan, The Red Sea Rules. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2001, p. 111-112.