The Storm Isn’t Wasted

This article was written by Danny Myers and published by Crossroads Professional Coaching.

There’s a moment in Mark 4 that I’ve read a dozen times, but it impacted me much more deeply after coming out of a similar situation in my life.

Jesus and the disciples get into a boat. He tells them they’re crossing to the other side. Simple enough. Then a storm comes out of nowhere, waves are crashing over the sides, and the boat is starting to fill. The disciples are panicking. Some of them were fishermen, so this wasn’t their first time on the water. They knew when a storm was bad.

And where was Jesus? Asleep in the stern, completely at rest.

They wake Him up with what I’d now call one of the most relatable questions in all of Scripture: 

“Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?””
– Mark 4:38

Don’t you care? 

I’ve asked that question more times than I’d like to admit.

When the Silence Starts to Feel Like Absence

Over the past year, I’ve been through a violent storm in my personal life. 

It was a season of fear, panic, and hopelessness. Spiritually, personally, professionally. Work felt flat. The passions I once had seemed like they had vanished. I was asking myself whether I should keep going with any of it.

The whole time, it felt like God was asleep in the back of my boat.

That’s the only way I know how to describe it. Not that I stopped believing. But there was an unsettling silence, and it scared me more than I wanted to admit.

I kept bailing water. I kept going through the motions. But I was running on fumes and wondering if He’d forgotten about me.

Fear and Faith Were Both in the Boat

Here’s the thing I always glossed over in that Mark 4 story: the disciples didn’t abandon ship. They were scared out of their minds and they still went to Jesus. That’s not nothing. Fear and faith living in the same chest at the same time. 

I understand that now a lot better than I did before this past year.

I think we get this idea in our heads that struggling means we’ve failed spiritually. If we had real faith, we wouldn’t be white-knuckling it through the storm. But the disciples were with Jesus, physically in the same boat, and they were still terrified.

God doesn’t disqualify us for being afraid. He meets us in it.

When Jesus woke up, He didn’t scold them for being in the storm. He asked them a straightforward question: 

“He said to his disciples, ‘Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?’”
– Mark 4:40

That question always felt a little harsh to me before. Now I read it less like a rebuke and more like an invitation. He was asking them to consider what they actually knew about who was in the boat with them.

He was there the whole time. Asleep, yes. But absent? Not for a second.

What Comfort Never Would Have Built

Paul writes something in Romans 5 that I’ve always struggled with accepting:

“Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”
– Romans 5:3-4

Suffering isn’t just something you survive on the way to the good stuff. It’s what builds up lasting traits within us.

Perseverance. Character. Hope.

Those aren’t things you pick up in the easy seasons. My comfortable stretches, if I’m being honest, produced very little of lasting value in me. I was content, sure. But I wasn’t growing.

The storm, as much as I hated it, was doing something. I just couldn’t see it from inside the boat with water splashing in my face.

Looking back, I now see what that season actually built. My faith is steadier. Less dependent on whether I feet close to God and more anchored in what I know to be true about Him. I learned the hard way that I can’t willpower my way through a spiritual desert. I tried. It doesn’t work. And somewhere in all of that, a lot of the noise fell away, and I could see more clearly which parts of my life actually meant something to me and which parts I was just doing out of habit or fear of stopping.

None of that came from a good season. All of it came from the storm.

The Boat Didn’t Sink

After Jesus calms the wind and the waves, the disciples are standing in a suddenly still boat, soaked and stunned. But they made it to the other side. Jesus said they would from the beginning, and they did.

The storm didn’t change their destination. It just made the crossing harder.

My boat didn’t sink either. I’m still here, still pushing forward, and striving to put my trust in God. I can honestly say I’m not the same person who got into the boat a year ago. And I mean that in a good way.

If you’re in a hard stretch right now, maybe professionally, maybe spiritually, maybe both, I’m not going to tell you it’s easy or that your feelings aren’t real. They are. But I’ll tell you what I had to keep reminding myself of.

He’s in the boat. He hasn’t moved.

The storm isn’t punishment. It’s not proof that He doesn’t care. It’s almost certainly not the end of the story. He might be preparing you for something bigger.

What’s He building in you through the hard season you’re in right now? I’d genuinely encourage you to sit with that question.

“Therefore, we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
– 2 Corinthians 4:16-18