Rowing, Not Drifting

Rowing, Not Drifting

Written by Layne Petersen, Director of Communications, layne.petersen@broomfieldumc.org

So this is the BUMC blog. Welcome to it, everyone! This being the first entry in our new blogosphere, I want it to be something special. But honestly, nothing special is really coming to me today. I want the heavens to open up with bolts of inspiration, but instead I’m just sitting here staring at a flashing cursor.

That’s kind of how life has been recently, honestly. What do we do when we’re seemingly stuck in the mire of the mediocre? When nothing much is happening and we can’t really see why. We beg God for a breakthrough, but His silence is the only answer. Max Lucado once referred to that as being “caught in the storm of the not yet” when talking about the disciples rowing on a stormy sea waiting for Jesus to show up. It seems like a contradiction in terms – waiting for something to happen shouldn’t feel like a storm, but often it does.

We pray the same prayers every day, but our bodies don’t heal, our marriages don’t work, our discipline fails us. But we still have to keep on going.

I live near UNC in Greeley, and at one of the old gates of the university, there’s an inscription that simply says “Rowing, not drifting.” The disciples had to keep rowing – “straining against the oars,” it says in Mark 6, until Jesus came to them. It also says he came to them “about the fourth watch of the night.” Meaning they rowed all night long wondering where he was. So where was he? He was praying for them. He was up on a mountainside to pray and it says he saw them straining. Jesus was a man whose natural reaction to sickness was to heal, and his natural reaction to seeing his friends struggle while he prayed was to pray for them. And if he prayed for them, he prays for us as well.

Now, that doesn’t grab my life and move it forward in the way I want it to most days, but knowing that the creator of the universe is interceding for me in the midst of my struggles at the oars is enough for me today.

Originally posted December 4, 2012.