Jesus calms the storm

[Journey with Jesus – Day 13]

As I mentioned before, I’m a fisherman.  Well, I was, anyway.  I knew the waters of Galilee like the back of my hand.  I’d fished in it when it was still and when the waters were raging.  I was used to storms.  But one time out on the water we experienced a storm like we’d never done before. The wind blew up out of nowhere, and the boat started rocking side to side, and water was coming up over the sides of the boat. At first, there was no sense of panic, we knew what to do – we’d had our carefully worked out plans, and normally these storms pass, but this just got worse and worse and worse. It wasn’t long before we seriously wondered if we’d get out of this one alive.

We were hardened fishermen and this storm was bad enough for us to be frightened.  Really frightened.  All of us were.  All of us, except Jesus.  He was with us in the stern of the boat, fast asleep! We couldn’t believe our eyes when we realised. 

To be fair, he was pretty exhausted – he’d been doing all this teaching and healing, wherever he went crowds followed him – he was in demand all the time.  The thing is, he was so full of compassion for everyone, if he saw need, he wanted to do something about it.  He always had time for everyone.  Wouldn’t turn anyone away, even when we tried to get him to do so.  All this took it out of him.  We got into the boats to get away from the crowds and grab some rest.  Looking back now, it’s no surprise he was sleeping like a log – not that we saw it that way at the time, of course.

No, we were bailing out water as fast as we could, but the boat was getting more and more swamped. And yet Jesus was away with the fairies!

As well as feeling sheer panic of that we were facing certain death, we felt let down, abandoned, alone.  In the short time we’d spent with Jesus, we’d been through a lot together.  It seemed he would always be there for us when we needed him.  And yet, in our darkest hour, he seemed blissfully unaware of our struggle.  We wondered if he really cared about us.  If he really cared, he’d show it in someway, instead of being asleep.  He may as well have not been there at all.

We couldn’t have that, so we woke him up – we shouted at him, “Lord, save us! We’re going to drown!” I don’t know what we expected Jesus to do – he’d done some pretty cool things before – perhaps there was a slight chance that he might be able to do something.  He was our only hope.

So, we shook him awake.  He took a moment to work out what was going on and then said, “Why are you afraid? You have so little faith!” It seemed like a funny thing to say at the time, but perhaps he thought we should have expected he’d be able to save us somehow.

He then stood up, looked around, and, calm as you like, had strong words for the wind and the waves to stop.

We thought that was a bit odd, but not half as odd as what happened next … The wind died down straight away, and the lake went dead calm – as if there hadn’t even been a gentle breeze on the water.

It was incredible.  They stopped at his command – just like that.  We wouldn’t have believed it if we hadn’t been there to witness this.  And I think we were more scared after he’d calmed the storm than while we thought we were going to die.  We never looked at Jesus in the same way again.  I mean, who is this guy? What kind of man has power to stop a storm, just like that? He really is amazing.