From 8/24/2022. CBB
This picture depicts Jesus on the boat with the disciples after speaking to the storm, “Peace, be still .” I’ve had this picture since 1997, the year of a fierce spiritual figurative “storm” in my life. It had hung over our bed for a number of years at two prior homes where Bill and I lived, the last one being where we sat out the fierce winds of Hurricane Michael. Now it is over my bed at the townhome where I live. This morning when I got up I looked at it, as I often do, but instead of just the boat in the foreground where Jesus stands with outstretched arms, I saw two other things I hadn’t noticed before…. a distant boat in the background and another indistinct mast of a third boat out near the horizon. “Huh,” I thought to myself. The presence of those other boats had never registered with me in a conscious kind of way. But this morning I thought, ” That’s how the Spirit of Christ is in the world. When He brings peace and provision for safety to His disciples, others often benefit and have no idea why suddenly they, too, experience peace and safety.” There are a lot of people who benefit from the earnest prayers and pleadings that are lifted to the Lord in distress by His followers that result in storms being quelled from which many others have been suffering the effects of, too, but they don’t know the Lord and His actions on our behalf.
I saw a praise report for relief from pain written by a person in response to her prayer that was dismissed by someone else with an alternate explanation. But the scoffer wasn’t the one in pain who had cried out to Jesus and he wasn’t impressed with her testimony. How do we treat the praise reports of others? Probably with a good deal more celebration and joy if we have been in the same storm, too. But even if two people haven’t been in the same storm, but both have experienced Jesus’ rescue from whatever storm it was, it is the presence and power of Jesus in their own respective storms, not the fact that their storms were the same storm that provides the bond between them. Sharing in having been rescued by the same Savior, not just having been rescued from the same or even similar storms is the bond that draws us together.
We’ve probably all heard the joke that what often distinguishes “major surgery” from “minor surgery” depends on how engagingly and from what perspective the story is told …. that of the individual who is or has had the surgery or that of an impersonal listener.
One might assume it is a bit like that for miracles, too. If you’re the recipient of a significant healing miracle from prayer you want to share and celebrate it as God’s great work. For far too many among us, if someone else received it, it can be easily dismissed as having occurred from easily explained natural phenomena.
