This picture, Jesus Calms the Storm, has hung in our home for 25 years, since the season of a fierce storm that blew from the four corners of the earth and would have destroyed my mind, my family, even my life but for the presence of Jesus with us in the boat. There have been other storms that have raged, but our little boat survived…. and now only Jesus and I remain in this boat. I am still fishing, sometimes just enough to feed myself and other times for as many as follow Jesus here to our boat’s slip and need to be fed.
6/25/17
(Enjoying the afternoon in the sunroom watching/listening to the storm on the lake ……….peaceful and safe)
As one considers growing through storms, on a related note Taryn Nergaard writes about how we sometimes confuse resistance and force…..
“Sometimes we mistake force for resistance.
In our obsession with (meeting and pushing against) resistance = growth, we can slip into a lifestyle of force that keeps us in a state of stress.
We force things to work, even when they harm us:
-overbooked schedules
-abusive environments
-jobs that demand more and more from you
We’re Christians, so we’re meant to persevere. Right?
In her book, The Lord is My Courage, KJ Ramsey reminds us that we need more cues of safety than cues of danger to rise.
When we continually choose what’s difficult, stressful, and overwhelming, we’re not growing. We’re actually stuck.
We’re stuck in states of stress all in the name of God (or growth.)
But God is the Good Shepherd – and he leads us into a place of abundance where force is unnecessary.
“Most of us struggle to rise into our lives with courage and hear that we are beloved because we’ve all been baptized in different water – the stream of scarcity. Most of us learn early in life to stay by scarcity’s stream of striving and strength, where the only way we are given the name Beloved is if we earn it every single day.
There’s only so much room in a stream, so we usually become bullies or beggars – either pushing our way to have a place by the water or hanging back in case someone else elbows us out of the way or says we don’t belong. So many of us live stuck in self-protection, pushing for a place at the stream, guarding it in case someone tries to shove us out of the way, hoarding whatever water we can get.
Most of us haven’t been shown the way to better waters, where God bends low and says – regardless of your striving, strength, or success – Beloved is the name you carry with you everywhere you go.”
– KJ Ramsey, The Lord is My Courage
(From Growth Notes by Taryn Nergaard)