It was now summer, a year after that winter, and I sat in church listening to our church Pastor preach about Jesus “taking naps” in the boat. The storm is raging, waves crashing, and the disciples cry out in fear, ‘Lord, save us!’ You rose, calmed the wind and the sea, and peace followed.
But before the miracle, there was the nap. You were resting in the middle of chaos. unshaken, unmoved, while the storm thrashes around them.
And as I hear this, my mind races back to my own storm. To the months when I thought my soul was paralyzed, abandoned, forgotten.
I didn’t expect the shift to come quietly. I didn’t expect it to come in this summer air, long after that winter had bruised me. But You, God, move in ways I don’t see until much later.
In that moment, I laugh through tears. Remembering winter — the heaviness, the unanswered prayers.” I had believed You were silent. Absent. Distant.
My husband had told me, “It sounds like peace.” But I rejected it. It felt nothing like peace. Yet now, listening to that sermon, I realized: Jesus didn’t calm the storm first. He rested in it. And maybe that’s what You were asking of me, not to fight, not to fix, not to force movement, but to rest with You in the middle of what made no sense.
The winter ache I once called paralysis became the doorway to this moment: the realization that stillness with You is not abandonment, but love. So I began to understand, well more like remembrance that peace does not always come wrapped in calm. Sometimes peace begins in the chaos where You sit with me in the valley before anything changes.
