“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.

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