BackstageMy grandmother taught me to count the storm, and I did not know she was also teaching me how to wait on God.
We would sit on the porch as the weather moved in over the fields, and when the lightning cracked she would take my hand and start counting, low and unhurried — one, two, three, four — until the thunder finally rolled in behind it, and then she would tell me how far off the storm still was. If the count was long, the storm was miles away, and I could be unafraid. If the count grew shorter each time, it was coming closer. The gap between the flash and the sound was how you knew where the storm really stood, and whether it was moving toward you or away.
It was years before I understood what a strange and beautiful thing that gap actually is.
Light comes at once; sound takes its time
The lightning and the thunder are the same event. They happen together, in the same instant, born of the same violent tearing in the sky. They leave at the same moment. But they do not arrive together, because they travel at wildly different speeds.
Light is almost unimaginably fast — for any distance you could see across, it arrives essentially the moment it leaves. But sound is slow. Sound lumbers. It moves through the air at a pace you could very nearly track, taking a full five seconds to cross a single mile. So the flash reaches you instantly, and then you wait — one, two, three — while the sound of the very same event is still crossing the distance toward you, still on its way, still coming. The thunder you finally hear is the sound of something that already happened. You are, in a small and literal way, always hearing the past. The sound is real, and true, and dispatched — it is simply still in transit.
And that gap, that strange silent interval between seeing and hearing, is not a sign that the thunder isn't coming. It is the measure of how far the sound still has to travel. The silence is the distance. Nothing is missing. Something is on its way.
I cannot tell you how much this reframed a certain kind of spiritual waiting for me — the hardest kind, the kind that comes after God has already moved.
The silence after the flash
There is a particular anguish we do not talk about enough, and it is not the anguish of a God who seems absent. It is the stranger ache of having genuinely seen Him — a prayer clearly answered, a door unmistakably opened, a moment you knew beyond argument was Him — and then finding yourself in a long, ringing silence where nothing further seems to arrive. You saw the flash. You know it was real; you were there; the light landed and lit up your whole sky for an instant. And now you are sitting in the quiet that came after, counting, and the thunder has not rolled in, and you begin to wonder whether you imagined the lightning altogether.
That is a brutal place to sit, because the silence tempts you to unsee the flash. If it were really Him, the doubt whispers, wouldn't the whole of it have arrived by now? Wouldn't I still feel it? This quiet must mean it wasn't real.
But the porch taught me otherwise. The gap after the flash is not evidence that nothing happened. It is the sound still crossing the distance. What you saw was real and instantaneous — the light does not lie — and now you are simply in the interval, the travel time, the space between the seeing and the full arrival. The silence is not the absence of the thunder. It is the measure of a sound still on its way to you.
The voice still crossing the distance
The Scriptures are full of the voice of God described as exactly this — as thunder.
There is an old song, one of the psalms, that does almost nothing but stand in awe of it: the voice of Yahuah over the waters, the voice of Yahuah in power, the voice of Yahuah that breaks the great trees and shakes the wilderness and makes the whole earth answer. The God of glory, it says, thunders. And I notice that the writer does not reach for lightning, for the silent flash. He reaches for thunder — the sound that takes its time, that rolls in after, that fills the sky once it finally arrives. As if the word of God were less like a flash that is over in an instant and more like a sound still traveling toward you across a distance, gathering, coming.
And another of the prophets puts words in God's own mouth about exactly this — that His word goes out from His mouth and does not come back to Him empty, but accomplishes what He sent it for and succeeds in the thing He dispatched it to do. Hold that next to the storm. A word goes out. It is sent. And a thing that has been sent, and has not yet arrived, is not a thing that failed. It is a thing in transit. When God has spoken over your life — when you saw the flash of Him promising, calling, beginning something — that word did not evaporate in the silence that followed. It is crossing the distance. It is still coming. The quiet you are counting through is not proof it will never land. It is the travel time of a thunder that left the same instant the light did and is, even now, on its way.
Count the gap and take heart
So here is what I want to hand you, if you are sitting in the silence after you were sure you saw God move.
Do not unsee the flash. The light does not lie, and you were not making it up. Something real happened, and it happened all at once, and it happened for you. You are not in an absence. You are in an interval — the counted, aching, faith-stretching gap between the seeing and the full arrival, which is not empty at all but full of a sound still traveling toward you.
And here is the tender part my grandmother knew that I did not, sitting small beside her in the dark. The gap tells you not only that the thunder is coming, but where the storm stands — and a storm that is genuinely of God is a storm moving toward you, not away. Every silence you count through is one you will not have to count again, because what has been sent does not turn back. The word is on its way. The sound left when the light did. And one day, at the end of a count you did not think you could hold through, the thunder of it will finally roll in and fill your whole sky, and you will know that the quiet was never the end of the story — only the distance a faithful sound had left to travel to reach you.
Count the gap. Take heart in it. It is not silence. It is thunder, still on its way.
