This
Week’s Focus: Jesus Calms a Storm
On that
day, when evening had come, he said to them, "Let us go across to the
other side." And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them
in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great
windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already
being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they
woke him up and said to him, "Teacher, do you not care that we are
perishing?" He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea,
"Peace! Be still!" Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm.
He said to them, "Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?"
And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, "Who then is
this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?
Mark 4:35-41
Dear Friends,
The Hubbel Space Telescope is as much a spiritual blessing as
it is a scientific breakthrough. For the scientific community it is a window
into the workings of a universe far greater than ever anticipated. For the
Christian community it is all that and more. It is an awesome demonstration of
the power of God who presides over an infinite and expanding universe, yet in
his love cares about our every thought, word and action.
Look
at the images captured by Hubbel and then think: the God who set these cosmic
storms in motion billions of years ago, the God who calmed the stormy Sea of Galilee
two thousand years ago, cares infinitely about the storms that rage within you
and me today. No one makes a passage through this life without storms. And if
they are not perilous in actuality, our pride has the ability to create
tempests in tea pots, magnifying petty fears, creating turmoil from minor or
imagined slights.
There was nothing minor or imagined about the storms that
rolled over Horatio Spafford. The Chicago fire destroyed his family fortune.
His four daughters, aged five to eleven, were lost at sea. His wife was driven
mad by grief. He was a prime candidate for despair and who could blame him? But
Spafford lived in Christ and Christ in him. Traversing the same stretch of
ocean that claimed his children, he wrote as he prayed:
When peace, like a river attendeth my
way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll,
Whatever my lot, Thou hath taught me to
say,
It is well; it is well with my soul.
My sin, oh the bliss of this glorious
thought,
My sin, not in part but in whole,
Is nailed to His cross, and I bear it no
more,
Praise the Lord, Praise the Lord, O my
soul.
Spafford
went on to literally walk in the footsteps of Christ. He took his recovering
wife to the Holy Land and, like Job, they started their family anew. Together
they served the Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities of Palestine with
orphanages, soup kitchens and hospitals. In tragedy they clung to Christ and in
triumph he bore them home.
In
today’s gospel the frightened followers asked: Who is this. Even the wind and the waves obey him. They would soon
learn the answer. The Messiah, the Savior, the Redeemer, God made flesh had
come among them. And all the storms or all the plots, the might of Rome or the
gates of hell…none would ever prevail against him or those who cling to him. No
astronomer’s telescope or psychiatrists couch has ever found a storm that could
not be calmed by the love of Jesus. His peace awaits us… a prayer away.
God
love you!
Image: He, Qi. Peace Be Still, from Art in
the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville,
TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=46102 [retrieved June 21, 2012].
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