Be Stilled

“He got up, and rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm.” (Mark 4:39)

I don’t know what’s more impressive: Jesus calming the storm or him simply being able to sleep through it, on the deck of a small boat, upon Lake Galilee.

I just returned from Africa, riding in planes for more than 30 hours. I’ve never been able to sleep much in a car or in a plane, let alone on a boat in a storm. But there’s Jesus, dead to the world, within the storm.

Perhaps he was too exhausted to worry. Having given so much of himself to the crowds and his disciples earlier in the day, he could have been forgiven, after all, for being spent. But increasingly I wonder, in this story, whether he isn’t simply showing disregard for what’s happening on the surface of things.

What kind of stormy circumstances are you facing this season? Perhaps the storm of health problems or financial problems. My current storm is a pending back surgery this fall. For you, maybe it’s the storm of a relationship that isn’t going very smooth. Or perhaps you’re caught up in the storm of divisiveness in our nation.

My own response, when life’s waters grow turbulent, is, like the disciples, to panic. Circumstances can make the best of us fearful, quite understandably. And trying to maintain our own calm is easier said than done when you’re being tossed around in a gale.

“Be still and know …” (Psalm 46:10) is great in theory but in practice, especially when it’s us doing the practicing, it can sometimes seem impossible. With Jesus, however, the opposite seems to happen: his deeply anchored presence calms even the waves. The ripple effect ... calm flows, from the center, out. “Quiet. Be still.”

In our stormy circumstances of life, perhaps a more liberating alternative is to be “stilled”. When we can’t do it in our own strength, it’s an opportunity to yield, to wake the resting Jesus, and to ask for help. Not for help to change all the external circumstances, necessarily, but to calm the wind and waves of our own stormy minds. “Quiet! Be still!”

And what happens when a sense of divine calm starts to rise within? Surely, it radiates, like a reverse ripple effect around us. Ripples of transformation, lapping gently upon others’ shores, with love. Quiet! Be stilled!

Choose today to surrender … to be stilled.