In Shakespeare’s King Lear, an old king loses almost everything that once defined him. He gives away his kingdom, is betrayed by those he trusted, and finds himself wandering outside in a violent storm.

The scene is unforgettable because the storm around Lear begins to reveal the storm within him. He has lost his crown, his authority, his comfort, his power. His external kingdom is falling apart. Yet strangely, it is there—in the wind and rain, stripped of everything—that Lear begins to discover something he had almost lost: his humanity.

For perhaps the first time, he begins to notice the suffering of others. He thinks about the poor, the homeless, those who have always lived exposed to the kind of hardship he is experiencing only now. The storm takes away what protected him, but it also reveals what his comfortable life had allowed him not to see.

Something similar happens in today’s Gospel.

When the storm rises on the Sea of Galilee, it does more than fill the disciples’ boat with water. It exposes something inside them. They wake Jesus and ask, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

That question was probably already somewhere deep within them. The storm simply brought it to the surface.

Storms often do that.

A crisis in a family can expose tensions everyone had learned to avoid. Financial difficulty can reveal where trust has become fragile. Illness can uncover resentments, fears, or priorities we had never examined. And sometimes a difficult season reveals cracks in our faith: we discover that we trusted God as long as life remained understandable.

This does not mean every storm is sent by God to teach us a lesson. But God can use even the storms we would never choose.

Sometimes we ask only for the storm to end. Christ may also be asking us to notice what the storm has revealed.

Where has trust weakened? What have we been avoiding? What needs forgiveness, honesty, healing, or rebuilding?

Lear loses an external kingdom and begins to discover an internal humanity.

Perhaps some storms do something similar in us. They strip away what made us feel secure long enough for us to see what is actually there—and, with God’s help, to rebuild not merely what we had before, but something deeper, truer, and stronger.