On one of my first nights back after temporarily returning to the Mid-Atlantic post-graduate school, I was stunned by the intensity of pounding winds, profoundly loud thunder and shocking lightning that constituted what I would later learn is termed a derecho.

My immediate surroundings pummeled in a moment during which I had been feeling deeply pained and perplexed by my situation (I still did not understand why my life in Atlanta had seemed to fall apart so suddenly and why it had not fallen back into place yet), I felt profoundly, and surprisingly, comforted.

In a time when it felt like all I could do to put one foot in front of the other, keeping my calm despite the turmoil and hurt storming in my heart, such a display felt almost validating, as if God were acknowledging so many of the world’s persistent questions, including the amplitude of my own inward, silent longings for answers and restoration after the cyclone of a coincident job offer and marriage proposal had seemed to level my world.

The most unbearable guidance one can receive at such a time – and, in fact, anytime before such an event is acknowledged and addressed – is arguably “peace, peace, when there is no peace.” Thank God for storms.

Even as I type, I am grateful and feel honored to be listening to the whir and rhythm of cicadas outside my window.

Their message feels, to me, similarly poignant. While, biologically, it seems illogical that their lives would be designed to follow such an unproportional trajectory of time spent underground before a brief, but glorious, emergence, through a poetic lens, these determined and beautiful creatures seem to sing to a world in need an important message:

Not everyone has yet been heard.

I wonder whether they are singing to directly to hearts who feel barely able to hold on another day:

“He remembers. He knows!” And that a persistent heart, even if buried underground for years on end, lives.