Don't let Christ fall asleep on your boat!

The most poignant and powerful principle this week for me came from the story of Christ calming the stormy sea (Matt 8: 23-27). In the podcast “Unshaken Saints”, the host shared a powerful symbolic lesson regarding this story: don’t let Christ “fall asleep” on your boat. Or, in other words, do we forget Jesus when we’re working in our comfort zones (i.e. our careers, callings and relationships)?

As soon as the disciples stepped onto those boats with Jesus, they entered into their comfort zones. Fishing on the Sea of Galilee had been their occupation for as long as they could remember. They knew the sea, they knew boats, they were completely relaxed as they stepped back into their comfort zone of fishing life.

Spiritually speaking, do we do the same thing? When challenged to do something unfamiliar do we rely on Christ more than when we're back doing something more routine? If we do that, what happens when the storms of life come during our "routine living?" Do we run to Christ and wake Him up and accuse Him of not caring about us? Or do we realize it was we that forgot about Him, and treated the situation as if He were asleep?

I've had a recent personal experience with this principle that I feel impressed to share. When Covid 19 hit and our family was immediately swept up in that life storm, most of our simple family routines were tossed overboard. It took some time and effort to reestablish new normal routines, but one that never got totally saved was our nightly couple prayers together. Because of the changes required in each of our stewardships during this time period, exhaustion hit us at different times and we rarely went to bed at the same time and thus rarely had that moment together at night to pray. Our 20 years of solid, "comfort zone" marriage, occasionally felt like it was sinking because it was being battered by the storms of life. For a while I've tried to diagnose the cause of this sinking without success-until I had a spiritual breakthrough these last few weeks...

Lent started last week, and this year I wanted to be more thoughtful about what I could sacrifice that would bring me closer to Christ. After a lot of thought and study I decided that I needed to give up reading on my phone before I go to bed each night, and instead, replace that nightly behavior with a couple prayer . I can testify that by putting our focus back on Christ and bringing Him more intimately back into our marriage relationship, those troubled waters have been rapidly calming.

I didn't understand the connection that was happening until I studied this Come, Follow Me lesson. Our marriage has always been one of my comfort zones, something we've been really good at-but we were good at it because we had included Christ. As soon as we took our eyes off of Him and tried to sail our marriage boat with Him asleep, things got really turbulent for awhile. 

To conclude, I wanted to share a couple of lessons that the Spirit has taught me through this experience…

First: there are some storms in life we can totally avoid if we keep Christ “awake in our boats”

Second: if we’ve gotten too comfortable and have let Christ “fall asleep in our boat” one way to “wake Him up” is through prayer. 

Third lesson: no matter how good (spiritually) we think we are doing, if we ask for and seek out ways we can improve, the Lord will show us how we can be better.