Are you comfortable flying? A lot of people are not. I chuckled when I read about a lady who was flying with her infant daughter. When they landed, they were met in the waiting area by her granddad, who took the baby while she proceeded to the baggage claim area. Standing there alone waiting to claim her baggage, she was absent-mindedly holding the baby's pacifier. She noticed a flight attendant staring at her--then at the pacifier, then back at her. Finally the flight attendant spoke. "Excuse me, Miss--is this your first flight?
Two fellows were sitting on a park bench. One of them said
to the other, "I'm afraid of flying. I take the train on all my long trips." The other said, "That's silly. Didn't you read about those 300 people who got killed on a train last week?"
"Three hundred people?" asked the fearful one. "How could
300 people die in a train crash?"
"A plane fell on it," said his friend.
Many of us are uncomfortable flying. One nervous fellow
noted that the Lord said, "LO, I am with you always."
Perhaps if we can imagine ourselves in a tiny plane being buffeted by a storm that is threatening to tear our small craft to pieces, we can appreciate the terror that seized the disciples when a terrible storm came up on the Sea of Galilee. The wind and the waves threatened to swamp their little boat. Only if you remember that some of these disciples were seasoned fisherman can you appreciate the fierceness of this storm. The disciples thought they might die. They were so frightened they woke Jesus, who was sleeping in the stern of the boat and asked him, "Teacher, do you not care if we perish?"
Many of us have asked the same question at some time in our lives. Jesus seems asleep in the stern of our boats and we want to ask, "Do you not care that we perish?"
You see,
EVERYBODY GOES THRU STORMS AT SOME TIME OR ANOTHER.
Our storm may be a problem marriage. I read recently about a grandmother, celebrating her golden wedding anniversary.
She told the secret of her long and happy marriage. "On my wedding day," she said, "I decided to make a list of 10 faults which, for the sake of our marriage, I would overlook in my new husband." A friend asked her to tell some of those faults. The grandmother replied, "To tell you the truth, I never did get around to listing them. Whenever my husband did something, though, that made me hopping mad, I would say to myself, `Lucky for him that's one of the 10!'"
A marriage Counselor asked one couple, "When things go wrong, do you blame each other?"
The wife answered, "Not always. Sometimes we blame the children. Sometimes we blame the President. Sometimes we just slam doors." There are a lot of door-slamming marriages- -marriages in which communication has broken down--marriages in constant turmoil.
Some marriages don't make it thru the storm, & the wreckage can be devastating. Especially for women. A recent study showed that women & children experience a 73% decline in their standard of living the year of their divorce. Ironically men's standard of living increases 42%.
Just as important is the fact that more and more couples find that divorce is no real solution to their problems. In her book, SECOND CHANCES: MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN A DECADE AFTER DIVORCE,
Judith Wallerstein writes, "Divorce is deceptive.
Legally it is a simple event, but psychologically it is a chain--sometimes a never-ending chain--of events, relocations and radically shifting relationships strung thru time." Marriage counsellors who a decade ago were advising couples to go ahead and part are now recommending couples hang in there and try to make it thru the storm. Of course, that has been God's plan all along. Marriage problems are a storm many people are going thru.
THE LOSS OF A LOVED ONE IS ALSO A TERRIBLE STORM WITH DEVASTATING EFFECTS.
One famous study, called "Broken Heart," researched the mortality rate of 4,500 widowers within 6 months of their wives' deaths. Compared with other men the same age, the widowers had a mortality rate 40% percent higher. What greater storm can we go thru than the loss of a loved one?
In Ernest Hemingway's "Islands in the Stream," an anguished
father mourns the loss of his oldest son. The boy has been killed in war. The father is grief-stricken. He will not eat or sleep. He walks alone on the beach for hours. A friend tries to persuade him to leave the beach and begin to come out of his depression. The father says to his friend, "I have been out here all day thinking about him and wanting to have him with me always. I know I have got to let him go. I have got to---but I cannot do it today." Some of you can identify with that father's deep hurt. The loss of a loved one is a dreadful storm.
FOR SOME OF US, THE STORM MAY BE A PERSONAL FAILURE.
Some of you may know the name, George MacDonald. He was a Congregational minister in a small parish in England in the middle of the 19th century. One day his deacons came to him to report that it was impossible for them to continue his salary. He would have to move on. He innocently offered to remain and support himself by writing and teaching. His wife, however, had insight that George did not.
"George," she said, "it isn't that the people here are too
poor to pay us. They don't want us."
Can you feel the hurt in those words, "They don't want us?" MacDonald went on to distinguish himself as a poet and a novelist, but the memory of that failure was always with him. All of us go through storms.
THE WORST PART IS THAT JESUS SEEMS TO BE ASLEEP.
"Why doesn't he intervene?" we cry out in our distress. Charles Dickens asked that same question thru poor demented Barnaby Rudge. Gabriel Vardon comes upon Barnaby, the lunatic lad, at dead of night. Barnaby is bending over the prostrate, bleeding form of a man who has fallen victim to highway robbery. "See," says Barnaby, "when I talk of eyes the stars come out! Whose eyes are they? If they are angels' eyes, why do they look down here and see good men hurt, and only wink and sparkle all the night?" That's the unanswerable question, is it not? Where is God in my distress? Do you not care that we perish?
In that beautiful movie, OUT OF AFRICA,
the question is asked in a different way. A young Danish woman named Karen Blixen goes to Kenya. There she marries a man she hardly knows. She plants a coffee plantation. For a while, paradise belongs to Karen Blixen. Then, after about 15 years of hard labor, within the span of a few months she loses it all. She loses her health, her lover, her friend, her coffee crop and her farm, and finally she loses her identity. Everything she lived for has been taken away from her.
Suddenly, she is confronted with the meaninglessness of it all, and she asks, "If I know a song for Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the field and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Would the air over the plain quiver with a color that I had had on?
Or the children invent a game in which my name was?
Or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me? Or would the eagles of the hills look out for me?" She gives her life to Africa, but when she's gone, Africa doesn't remember. There's nothing there that remembers her, though she remembers it.
Do my griefs and heartaches matter? That is the question she is asking. Is there anyone there who sees and understands? Teacher, do you not care that we perish?
THE STORY IN MARK'S GOSPEL IS AN AFFIRMATION. YES, JESUS DOES CARE.
When the storms of life are raging, he does care. When it seems you cannot hold on a moment longer, he does care. When
the waters threaten to engulf, he does care.
The disciples rouse Jesus from his sleep, and he speaks to the wind and the waves, "Peace! be still!" And the wind ceases and there is a great calm. Then he turns to the disciples and asks, "Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?"
THE CENTRAL QUESTION IN LIFE IS NOT HOW MANY STORMS WE MUST PASS THRU. THE QUESTION IS WHETHER WE HAVE FAITH FOR THE STORMS.
All of us will encounter storms. Sometimes it will seem as if God Himself has forsaken us. It is at such times that our
faith will be critical.
Do you believe in a God who loves you and has promised never to forsake you? Do you believe that however dark the clouds may be, behind those clouds, the sun still shines? Do you believe that beyond every cross, there is an empty tomb? If you do, you can weather the storm, however severe. If you do not, today is the day to appropriate that faith for yourself.
William Gibson wrote the book, MASS FOR THE DEAD.
In it he tells how after his mother's death he yearned for the faith that had strengthened her during her remarkable life. It was also the faith that had upheld her during her courageous dying. So he took his mother's gold-rimmed glasses and faded and well-worn prayer book and sat in her favorite chair. He opened the prayer book because he wanted to hear what she had heard. He put on her glasses because he wanted to see what she had seen. He sat in her place of prayer and devotion because he wanted to feel what she had felt. He wanted to experience what had so deeply centered and empowered her. Nothing happened, though. It did not work.
That is not too surprising. He needed a faith of his own--not his mother's faith. As someone said long ago, "God has no grandchildren."
Do you have a faith that you can call your own? Do you have faith for the storms of life?
Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, in his book STAY ALIVE ALL YOUR LIFE,
tells about encountering a hurricane in the Atlantic. They managed to sail around danger, however. Afterwards, Dr. Peale and the captain were visiting. The captain said he had lived by the philosophy that if the sea is smooth, it will get rough, and if it is rough, it will get smooth. Then the captain added, "But with a good ship you can always ride it out."
What happens, though, if you are in a tiny ship in a terrible storm? That was the predicament the disciples faced. That is the predicament many of us sometimes face. At such times all we can do is rely on the faith we have nurtured all these many years. When we do, if our faith is our own and if it is real, we will hear a voice, a voice that calms the storms within our own souls. "Peace," that voice will say. "Peace. Be still."
Main idea from Seven Worlds, Eric Ritz
