Colloquial Soliloquy

I have always loved the story of Jesus rebuk­ing the storm in Mark 4:35 – 41. When I was a child I used to hide when storms came. I was very afraid of thun­der and I was too lit­tle to under­stand that noise was the only real threat thun­der had to offer. It didn’t mat­ter in the midst of the storm though. All I knew was I was scared and needed shelter.

I have come quite a long way from the fright­ened child hid­ing under her bed from the thun­der, but some storms still scare me. Some noises still leave my soul greatly jolted and deeply disturbed.

War is the storm of my adult­hood. The storms of deploy­ments and uncer­tainty still leave me search­ing for shel­ter. There are many days when I wish I could hide from it all, and come out when the storm is over. It is an abid­ing faith that allows me to keep from run­ning and hid­ing. I can abide because Christ Jesus abides with me in His Word and through the Holy Spirit.

Can I “con­sider it joy” when I face these tri­als? Not on my own. I can con­sider it joy when I rest in the knowl­edge that the tri­als I face day in and day out are not put there for my defeat. Accord­ing to James 1:2 those tri­als are put before me to help me grow in endurance.

Does this mean I should embrace war and fear and never pray for it’s end? Of course not. It means I need to walk toward the trial with con­fi­dence and remem­ber that the Lord will not put me through more than He will enable me to han­dle. I trust that what­ever He calls me to endure, He will cer­tainly equip me to han­dle. I pray for war to cease, but I also pray for the grace to embrace with faith what­ever real­ity God has placed before me.

When I pon­der the story of Christ and the dis­ci­ples in that tiny boat being tossed all around I have to won­der what the out­come would have been had the dis­ci­ples asked Jesus to help their faith before they asked Him to stop the storm.  There is noth­ing wrong with cry­ing out “Lord, please stop the storm!” The scrip­ture pas­sage clearly shows that the Lord rebuked the storm, and not the dis­ci­ples. He did gen­tly admon­ish them for their lack of belief. They were sup­posed to assume that Jesus did, most def­i­nitely, care for them and their lives.

I am still prac­tic­ing. It’s still my propen­sity to yell out “Lord, please stop the storm!” instead of cry­ing out “Lord please give me the faith I lack!” first. What if I asked the Father to still my soul before I asked Him to still the storm? I pray one day this will be my response and it will feel as nat­ural as tak­ing my next breath. Instead of being tossed about help­lessly in the boat, it is my sin­cere prayer that I will abide with the Lord in the eye of the storm.