“Sooner or later, we gotta start rowing again… umm… What do we do when we get to the shore?”

Thoughts that would have been going through Dan’s mind after Jesus told him to cross the lake with the other disciples, and a huge storm kicked up while he was in the middle of the lake. And Jesus? Oh yeah… He was sleeping in the back of the boat with His head on a pillow. When we woke Him up, He asked us why we were freaking out.

Referencing the disciples’ experiences in Mark 4:35-40

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For years I read Mark 4:35-40 and naively thought that after Jesus asked the disciples why they were freaking out that they just kind of shrugged the experience off and started rowing to the other side of the lake. In essence, I read that section of Scripture like they just must have thought, “That was weird,” shook their heads, and started rowing. Verse 41 didn’t register much at all. It reads, “The disciples were absolutely terrified. “Who is this man?” they asked each other. “Even the wind and waves obey him!” [NLT]

I wrote a newsletter article about Jesus being asleep during the storm back in 2011 entitled, “Teacher, Don’t You Care that We’re Going to Drown?”. That article covered our responses to the things that happened in our lives after the storm stops. It didn’t really cover what happens if the storm keeps going, or the point right when we’re confronted by the Lord in the middle of our storm. While I was recently passing through an intense emotional storm of my own, the Lord seemed to tap me on the shoulder and invite me to “get back in the boat and have a chat”. It was as if He brought me back to the moments after He calmed the storm in the middle of the lake and had a teaching moment with the disciples. He wasn’t mad that I was freaking out. He acknowledged that I was in crisis. A crisis that arose as I was following the instructions that He gave me. He was asking me to trust Him and to let Him work through the crisis to fix some broken parts of my heart. A process that could only happen as I sat with Him in the boat in the middle of the storm. That process isn’t fun. I wouldn’t have signed up for it. But it taught me a lot. Sometimes the Lord doesn’t calm the external storms in our lives. He wants to use the external storms to calm the internal storms in our soul. That process is painful, but it yields benefits both here on earth and in eternity.

That’s when I realized there was a whole lot more to the story than the disciples freaking out, waking Jesus up, Jesus telling them to take a chill pill, them shrugging their shoulders, and then just simply rowing the boat again. I finally started experiencing the verse 41 effect. That, “What on earth just happened?!!!” or that, “God, I’m obeying You and things are falling apart. What gives?” effect. As you read beyond the words of that verse and ponder what was going through their hearts, you can assume there must have been a significant time of emotional processing. I was at that point. I asked the Lord a lot of questions about the situation. “What did I do wrong?” “What did I do right?” “Why are You allowing me to be in this situation?” “Why don’t You seem to be fixing things?” “What am I supposed to do now?” “What do You want from me?” He answered some of those questions. He left others unanswered. Mainly, He was asking me to trust Him and let Him do everything that He wanted to do in the hearts of everyone involved. Those “conversations in the boat” took place over a few days. It was at the end of those conversations that I had to decide if I was going to start rowing again. In other words, I had to decide if I was going to accept His will and embrace the process – the situation – that He was asking me to embrace. By His grace I did.

Let’s face it. When we’re stuck in the boat in the middle of the lake, we don’t have many viable options. We can choose to jump out of the boat in the middle of the lake, but we’re too far away from the shore. We can choose to sit in the boat and continue to freak out. That won’t help. I gotta be honest here. I felt kind of trapped. Sometimes we truly are stuck in the middle of the lake. It is then that we have no real, viable option, but to surrender to the Lord, grab the oar, and start rowing again. By the way, while we’re rowing, those conversations with the Lord and our own internal processing continues.

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Sooner or later we reach the shore, and we realize that we aren’t trapped in the situation anymore. It is at that point that we’re faced with another decision. What do we do now? Do we keep following Jesus now that this current crisis has passed? What if He allows another storm? Do we stop trusting Him and look for another trail? I think every disciple of Christ has to face this decision multiple times in their lives. By the way, I’m not talking about completely walking away from Jesus and not being a Christian anymore. I’m talking about choosing between full surrender to Jesus and walking with Him on His path, or trying to forge our own path in life. I think we all know people who have made the decision to keep walking along the shore with Jesus, and those who decided to walk their own path. The fruit of those decisions isn’t always immediately obvious. Sometimes those who walk their own path look like they’re doing a whole lot better than those who walk with Jesus. Remember, we’re living for eternity. The end results of our decisions aren’t always obvious here on this earth.

Something else to keep in mind… life happens no matter what path we choose. Things don’t always get easier when we walk with Jesus. What happens when the disciples finally do reach the shore in Mark 5? They run right into a shrieking, demon possessed man in the Gerasene tombs. He was the guy they couldn’t even bind with chains because he kept breaking them and cutting himself. Adding to the commotion that day was about 2000 pigs running off a cliff, and the people watching the pigs who were freaking out and telling Jesus to leave. Something powerful must have happened in the hearts of the disciples through it all. They saw a terribly messed up man get delivered from a legion of demons. They saw a man who was demonic and crazy experience the power and love of the same Savior who woke up from His nap and calmed the storm. Their conversations with Him... Their internal wrestling… What they just witnessed as the choose to continue walking along the shore with Jesus… It all strengthened their resolve to fully surrender to the Lord. After that mighty deliverance, they all got back in the same boat with Him and went to the other side of the lake. I’m sure that they fully remembered what happened the last time they climbed into this boat with Jesus. Somehow, their experiences with Him yielded a deeper determination to follow Jesus wherever He asked them to go. The storm… the questioning… the decisions… it was all worth it.

Sometimes we need someone with an outside perspective to hear our hearts and walk with us to Jesus. If you’re struggling in a storm-tossed boat… If you’re sitting with your hands on the oars wondering what just happened… If you’re wondering what to do when you reach the shore… Reconciliation Ministries is here for you. We offer biblically based licensed professional counseling, mental health coaching, inner healing prayer, and so much more. Call us at 586.739.5114 and get the help you need.

Photo of man in boat used under license with Shutterstock.com. Photo of man on shore used from www.shutterstock.com.

© 2026 Reconciliation Ministries of Michigan, Inc. This article may be reproduced and distributed as long as no fee is charged and credit is given.

When My Mother and Father Forsake Me...

Dan Hitz is the Executive Director of Reconciliation Ministries of Michigan, a member ministry of the Restored Hope Network dedicated to bringing freedom to men, women, and adolescents struggling with sexual and relationship issues.  For more information contact Reconciliation Ministries at 586.739.5114, or visit us on the web at www.recmin.org.

For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, And that my soul knows very well.

Psalm 139:13-14

Those verses were intended to give us comfort as we realize the great attention to detail that Lord used to lovingly put us together in our mother’s womb. For those of us who grew up in a dysfunctional family, those verses may bring up different emotions altogether. We may wonder why the Lord “chose to put us in that specific womb”. Far from feeling good about ourselves as the Lord’s creation, our negative upbringing can make us feel like damaged goods.

Erik Erikson is a developmental psychologist famous for identifying the stages of psychosocial development. His theory basically describes God’s intent for the role that parents and other significant people play in our emotional and social development. Unfortunately in this fallen world, not all of us have grown up with a healthy mother and father. Not all of us have gone through childhood and adolescence with a healthy connection to our peers. If that is the case in your life, the Lord can heal the emotional wounds inflicted through the things you have experienced. He can also heal the wounds you’ve endured because the nurturing and care that you were supposed to receive didn’t happen. Psalm 27:10 reads, “When my father and mother forsake me, then the Lord will take care of me.” God can heal the hurts in your heart and fill the emotional voids.

A brief exploration of God’s intended role for our parents and peers will help you understand where you need the Holy Spirit to touch your heart. Our relationship with our mother is the most important relationship that we have when we are born. Mothers are intended by God to give us a sense of being – a sense that it’s okay to be alive and that we have value. Mom’s nurture us. When we are hungry they feed us. When we mess our diapers, they change us. We learn from them that our lives are celebrated and that we will be well cared for.

After we learn to crawl and walk, we look beyond mother to our father. Fathers are intended by God to help us learn to explore the world and take the initiative to try new things. They are also designed by God to encourage us to grow into the identity and purpose that He created us to have. Dads empower us to become established in this world and succeed. Little girls learn what it means to be female through their mothers, while little boys learn what it means to be male from their fathers.

As we enter school, the next important relationships we have are with our same-gender peers. At this stage boys usually think girls have “cooties” and girls may think boys are a bit nasty. This is a normal stage of development. Little boys learn how to relate to other little boys as they interact and play together. It works the same for girls. We learn that we are a good and acceptable little boy or girl as we fit in well with other little boys or girls.

As we gain confidence in our own gender peer group, we then begin to reach out to the other gender and learn how to relate to them. Boys notice that the girls lose their cooties and are becoming attractive. Girls notice that the boys aren’t so nasty after all. Confidence in who we are as a person continues to grow as we establish healthy relationships with the opposite sex.

God intends our emotional and relational development to continue throughout our lives as we enter into committed relationships, begin our families, and relate to others in our community. Many of us have not had the ideal development and growth described in this article. A problem at any stage of development will create challenges in the future stages. Fortunately, the Lord has taken that into account and has made provision for our emotional healing on the cross. We can take comfort in the verse that was referenced earlier in this article which reads, “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take care of me.” When Jesus began His ministry, He read out of the book of Isaiah where it says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted…” (Luke 4:18-19). In the original language, the phrase “brokenhearted” refers to shards of glass like when you break a mirror. Jesus was saying that He was sent by the Father to heal the “shards of glass” – the fragments of our heart – from emotional trauma and neglect. We find in Jesus a loving Savior who is willing to hear our prayers, heal our emotional wounds, and fill the voids in our hearts with His presence.

If you’ve grown up without the kind of nurturing that God designed you to have, spend time in prayer and share your hurts with Him. Recognizing our areas of deep need is a first step in overcoming our mother and father wounds. Be honest about your pain. Ask Him to teach you to recognize His healing presence and to heal your heart. As you work through the various areas of need in your heart, you may recognize pockets of hidden anger. It is important for your own personal growth to learn to forgive those who have wounded you. Forgiveness is more for your sake, than for the sake of those who have offended you. Your offender may be totally unaware that he or she has wounded you, or he or she may actually be glad that you were wounded. We live in a very fallen world. Harboring anger and resentment will only serve to hinder you, keep you bound to your wounds, and give your offender the victory. Forgiveness sets you free. Ask the Lord to help you release your anger and resentment to Him and allow Him to deal with those who have hurt you. Your offender and your wounds will lose their power as you experience the healing power of Christ.

Sometimes when we are sinned against, we respond with sinful reactions. Ask the Lord to show you the areas in your own life where you have responded to your pain in sinful ways. When He does, repent and seek to make amends where appropriate. In walking away from our sin we find a deeper capacity to receive God’s love and walk in deeper relationships with others in the Body of Christ. In addition to friends, we all need others who are more mature than us and have journeyed successfully through some of life’s difficult pathways. Ask the Lord to send you a safe, Christian mentor to walk with you and help you in your journey. Your pastor, a recovery group, or the pastoral care department at your church may be a good place to start. No pastor or mentor can become the long-lost mother of father that you never had, but he or she can share his or her experience with you as you both walk towards Jesus together.

As you follow these steps in your journey, you will begin to experience the fulfillment of the verse, “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take care of me.” You will grow into a beautiful relationship with God the Father where He truly will fill the voids in your heart. He longs to become the safe, loving, nurturing parent that you have always wanted.

© Reconciliation Ministries 2014. This article may be reproduced and distributed as long as credit is given and no fee is charged.