When I first moved to Florida, I found a small apartment about a mile from work and thought I was set. I wound up living there for six years and they were six very trying years. During the time I lived there the following things happened: three people died, police dogs patrolled the hall outside my door, and my neighbor tried to set fire to my door.
The last year I lived there, I slept on my couch every night with a hammer in hand in case someone tried to break in. When I had to walk from the car to my apartment at night, I carried a cell phone, not so I could call 911 (the phone was ancient and didn’t work) but so I could bean someone in the head with it should they try and rob me (the phone was ancient and huge).
Years later when someone asked me if I had any problems with roaches when I lived there, I looked them straight in the eye and without blinking said, “No, not roaches.”
One night, I couldn’t take it anymore and I called an attorney and asked if I had cause to break my lease. He brushed me off and told me simply no. I cried that night. I cried hard. The situation felt hopeless to me. I was terrified, scared to sleep at night, and I had no escape.
A few days later, a lady at work, whose husband was in real estate, offered me a condo to rent. It was a miracle. It was just what I needed. Despite the cost, I decided to break my lease. But then the condo association informed my would-be landlord that they don’t allow cats and that was it … poof … there went my miracle.
Once again, I felt myself falling into despair.
Today I was reading King’s Cross and the story from Mark chapter 4. Jesus and the disciples are on a boat in the middle of a storm. The waves are huge and crashing into the boat, threatening to swamp it. The disciples are appropriately freaked out, not just by the storm, but by the fact that Jesus is sleeping through the whole ordeal.
So they wake him and say, “Don’t you care if we drown?”
Later in Mark chapter 5, a synagogue ruler named Jairus asks Jesus to heal his daughter. She’s very sick with a fever and it’s urgent that Jesus come quickly, but along the way, Jesus is seemingly distracted by a woman who touches his cloak and is healed. Because Jesus takes a moment with this woman, the child he is going to see dies.
Here are two stories that begin with a portrait of an indifferent Jesus, a Jesus who doesn’t seem to get it. He doesn’t care that his disciples are about to drown. He doesn’t see the urgency in going to heal Jairus’s daughter. He sleeps. He plods. He’s in no hurry.
This is the Jesus we see when we feel helpless. This is the Jesus we see when we are in the storm with the waves crashing around us. This is the Jesus we see when we have lost all hope.
Our despair clouds our vision and we miss out on seeing just who Jesus is.
So who is the real Jesus?
Well, after the disciples wake Jesus during the storm, he tells the wind and the waves to be still and they are in an instant.
And when he finally gets to Jairus’s daughter, he can’t heal her of her illness since she’s already succumbed, so he raises her from the dead instead.
What were the reactions to these miracles? Mark writes that the disciples were more afraid after Jesus calmed the storm than when the storm threatened their lives. Mark writes that Jairus and the others were “astonished” by the miracle Jesus performed.
What do these two stories have in common? They both have people who were impatient with Jesus, who doubted him, who nearly let their worry and grief consume them, and then were ultimately given miracles more astounding than anything they could have imagined.
Timothy Keller asks this question: “Are you trying to hurry Jesus?”
I remember that when I lived in that horrible apartment I could not understand why such a horrible thing was happening to me. I could not understand why nothing was working out despite how much I prayed. I loved God. I believed in Him. Why wasn’t He answering my prayers?
I wanted God to save me and I wanted Him to do it right that second.
Instead I had to wait and that wait was agonizing.
But low and behold, a few months later, my crazy neighbors were evicted and a few months after that a friend offered me another apartment. I wound up moving out just when my lease was up. I didn’t have to sacrifice any money and I wound up moving to an apartment where I would feel safe and secure for the four years I would wind up living there.
Sometimes the miracle we want is not the miracle we need.
And sometimes the miracle God has in store for us is so much better than anything we could picture.
We have to trust Him.
We have to trust even when it looks like we’re going to drown.
Why, Timothy Keller asks, would you ever doubt God, who as Jesus weathered the ultimate storm on the cross? He says, “If the sight of Jesus bowing his head into that ultimate storm is burned into the core of your being, you will never say, ‘God, don’t you care?’ And if you know that he did not abandon you in that ultimate storm, what makes you think he would abandon you in the much smaller storms you’re experiencing right now?”
