Earlier in July 2012, I was driving from Nashville up to Michigan for concerts and family time and I literally found myself driving through the jet stream.
The Experience of Driving Through the Jet Stream
You know how you watch the weather forecast on the news or the Weather Channel and you can see it in a curvy line streaking from West to East across the United States. I was somewhere between Louisville, KY and Indianapolis, IN and it was 106 degrees in the shade. Up ahead in the distance I could see this ribbon of wind flowing from my left to right and since I was heading north I figured out very quickly it must be the jet stream. It was dusty and looked very much like sand storms I remember from living in the Southwest. I have had the adventure of flying through the Jet stream in an airplane and that was to say at best “unnerving.”
White Knuckle Mode
Fully aware that I needed to go into “white knuckle mode” I braced for the wind to slam into my van as I entered the unknown and the formidable jet stream. I was out of it as quickly as I entered it and all I could thick was “wow what a rush!” I stopped at a rest area and the temperature was 20 degrees cooler. The Jet Stream is normally in the atmosphere so in a weird way I felt like God shared a little secret with me. Jet streams are boundaries that separate adjacent air masses with significant differences in temperature. So they keep hot air in the south and cool air in the north among other things.
When I really started thinking about this it made me think about the boundaries God has around us that we don’t even see. It also made me think of the turbulence we go through to get from one area of life, growth and even trouble into an area of comfort. Now I love hot weather but anything over 100 is even uncomfortable for me. To go through that sand filled, turbulent flow of air made me think of the troubles we face here when things we can’t control are dropped in our lap.