The Quiet After the Storm

The First Strange Morning

You wake up. You sit up. You do not remember, for a few seconds, why everything feels different. Then you remember. The argument is over. The wrestling is over. The long campaign of quiet disagreement you did not know you were waging against God has been, finally, lost — and the losing feels like nothing like losing.

The flat you used to feel, the low hum of existential tension, is not there. There is a silence in its place. At first you think the silence is absence. You grope around for the hum, to make sure you are still you, and you cannot find it. You wonder whether something has gone wrong. You check in the mirror. Your face looks like your face. Your body still knows how to move. The coffee is still coffee.

It takes you the rest of the morning to recognize what the silence actually is. It is the absence of self-argument. For as long as you can remember, part of your mind has been occupied with disputing some aspect of God — with quietly pushing back against His claims to sovereignty, with maintaining a small, deniable pocket of autonomy, with holding the edge of your own will against the edge of His. That dispute was the background noise of your life, and you had grown so used to it that you had forgotten it was there. Now it is gone. The pocket has been emptied. The autonomy you were guarding has been surrendered. And the silence is loud because it used to be louder in the other direction.

What Happened to the Waves

"He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, 'Quiet! Be still!' Then the wind died down and it was completely calm."

MARK 4:39

The Greek phrase translated completely calm is galēnē megalē. Megalē means great, massive, overwhelming. Galēnē means calm — but not the calm of nothing-is-happening. It means a calm that fills a space like a tangible substance. The disciples had just come through a storm that nearly sank the boat. A second before, waves had been breaking over the sides. Water was in the bilge. The boat was pitching. The air was full of wind and spray and shouting. And then Jesus spoke two words and the air emptied of noise and filled, instead, with a silence so total it was a presence rather than an absence.

That is the calm you are inside of right now. Not the calm of a slow day. The calm of a storm that was stilled. The silence is loud because something just happened. The Master just walked onto the deck. The sea just obeyed. And in the galēnē megalē that followed, the disciples turned to each other in an awe that the text marks specifically: "they were terrified and asked each other, 'Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!'" (Mark 4:41).

Take note of their emotion. They had just been saved from drowning and their first response was not thank goodness. It was terrified. Greek ephobēthēsan phobon megan — literally, they feared a great fear. Because salvation in the presence of Jesus is not a relaxing event. The storm had been frightening. The calm was more frightening, because the calm revealed who He was. The storm, at least, was a natural phenomenon they could explain. The calm was a word of command to nature from a man who, apparently, had the authority to give it. That is worse than a storm. That is a God.

This is why your quiet this morning has a taste you were not expecting. It is not the quiet of a good night's sleep. It is the quiet of having just been saved by Someone who could speak your particular storm dead. The calm is shot through with the awareness of who was willing to do that for you. There is gratitude in the quiet, but there is also a hush — the hush of a creature who has just discovered, in a way they did not know before, that the One who loves them is not safe in any manageable sense. He is holy. He is Lord. He speaks and the wind stops.

The Peace That Passes Understanding

Paul had a name for this quiet. He called it "the peace of God, which transcends all understanding" (Philippians 4:7). Not the peace of having understood. The peace that exists past understanding — in a place your cognition cannot quite reach. You cannot explain, to yourself or anyone else, why you are this quiet this morning. You have just learned things that should upset you. You have just had parts of your theology dismantled. You have just been told that you did not author your own rescue and that the gratitude you had been storing up for yourself was misaddressed. By any ordinary accounting you should be more unsettled now than you were yesterday. And yet you are less.

That is because the peace does not come from understanding. It comes from being known. You are no longer arguing with the One who made you, and as a result you are available to be known by Him in a way you were not before. The silence is the sound of His knowing. The silence is what it feels like when the Spirit of God takes up residence in a room that is no longer being used for a debate. All the furniture has been rearranged to accommodate Him, and you are sitting in a chair you did not know the house had, watching light fall on a floor you did not know was there.

The peace is not the absence of questions. You still have questions. You will have questions for the rest of your life. But the questions are different now. They are not accusations disguised as questions. They are inquiries from a child at a Father's knee. You ask because you want to know Him better, not because you want to find the loophole that lets you take the credit back. The difference in posture makes every question a smaller weight than it used to be. You can carry a hundred questions now without being tired. Before, you could not carry one.

What to Do in the Quiet

Do very little. Do not try to organize what has happened into a system. Systems come later. Do not try to tell anyone yet; you do not have the vocabulary, and attempts to explain what has happened to you will often come out sounding less than it was, which will discourage you. The telling will come. Let it wait.

Do three small things in the quiet, and let them be enough.

One. Open a Gospel and read it. Not as an apologist, looking for arguments. Not as a systematician, looking for proofs. Just as a reader, looking at Jesus. Read the quiet parts. The parts where He is alone and praying. The parts where He touches the leper. The parts where He weeps at the tomb. You will find Him different than you remembered. You will find, perhaps for the first time, that you are in love with Him and not just with His ideas.

Two. Pray, but simply. Use the shortest prayer in your body. Maybe just His name. Jesus. You will find that you can pray His name for minutes at a time now without needing to add anything. His name is a full prayer. The quiet can hold it the way a cup holds water. Fill the cup.

Three. Go outside. Walk. Notice things. A sovereign God made the tree in front of you. A sovereign God made the sparrow. A sovereign God gave you eyes to see both. Your senses have been handed back to you under new management. The world is not less beautiful because it is being held up by Someone else. The world is exactly as beautiful as it is because it is being held up by Someone else. Look. Let the looking be worship. It is already worship. You did not choose it; your nervous system is worshiping Him right now whether you assent or not, because it is doing the thing nervous systems were designed to do: notice the glory.

The Storm May Come Back

It may. Not the same storm, probably, but another one. A doubt. A sin. A terror in the night. You should know that the quiet you are in this morning is not a promise of uninterrupted weather. It is a promise of a Master who speaks to weather. When the next storm comes, you will not have to calm it yourself. You will not have to hold the boat together. You will call on the One who has already stilled one storm in your life, and He will still this one too. He is, after all, in the boat. He has been sleeping in the stern this whole time. Wake Him. He will rise. He will speak. The wind will stop.

For now, though, the wind has stopped. Sit in it. Drink your coffee. Let the morning be what it is. You have come out of a storm you did not know how to calm, into a calm you did not know how to produce. That is grace. That is — to use the old word — rest. You have been held, you are being held, you will be held. He is not going to let go. The quiet will do its work. Let it.

"You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in you."

ISAIAH 26:3

The trust is new. The peace is older than the trust. Both are His.