With You
Day 14 — Headwind: Sabbath
You have been in heavy weather this week. Not the disorienting kind of Week 1 — the wounding kind. Rejection and betrayal came first, and with them the particular confusion of a wound from the inner circle — the people who should have been safe, and weren’t. Then unanswered prayer, with its quiet, persistent question about whether the silence means something about you, or about Him. Then loss — the wind that doesn’t bring things back, that leaves an empty place where something used to be, and asks you to keep walking anyway. If you have been honest with this week, you are tired. Not just from the reading — from the recognition. These winds have names because they are real, and naming them costs something.
Today you don’t have to go anywhere. Today the invitation is simply to stop — which is harder than it sounds, because the habit of the person in weather is to keep moving, keep managing, keep doing the next thing. Stopping feels like surrender to the storm. It isn’t. It is the practice of becoming aware of who is already in the boat with you.
There is a moment in Mark 4 that this whole week has been building toward. The disciples are in a storm, straining at the oars, and Jesus is asleep in the stern. They wake Him with the cry that is also yours, that has probably been yours at some point this week: Teacher, don’t you care if we drown? It is not a cry of unbelief. It is a cry of unawareness. He was there the whole time — through the rejection, through the silence, through the loss, through every wind this week has named. He did not arrive when they called. He was already there. He had been there when the storm arrived. He was asleep in the stern, unhurried, unbothered, present.
His presence didn’t change the weather. It changed everything else.
That is the WITH YOU of this Sabbath. Not resolution. Not explanation. Not the storm stopping. Just the awareness — slowly, if that’s how it has to come — that you have not been alone in any of it. Not in the betrayal. Not in the silence. Not in the loss. Not once.
Rest in that today. Let it be enough.
A Practice for Today
These are offered as options — not obligations. Choose what fits where you are.
Be still on the water. Find fifteen minutes of genuine quiet — no phone, no noise, no agenda. Sit with the image of Jesus asleep in the stern of your boat. Not distant. Not absent. Present and unhurried. Let that image do its work without analyzing it.
Write a letter. Address it to Jesus. Tell Him which wind this week pressed hardest. Tell Him what it cost. Then write one sentence at the bottom: I believe You were there. You don’t have to feel it fully to write it. Writing it is a step toward knowing it.
Take a slow walk. No destination, no pace, no podcast. Just move through the world slowly and pay attention to what is present — the ordinary evidence of a God who hasn’t gone anywhere. Let the walk be the rest.
Tell someone. Find the person who has been Ruth to you this week — the one who has stayed, who has been Jesus with flesh on without knowing it — and tell them what their presence has meant. Not a long conversation. Just: I want you to know I’ve noticed. It has mattered.
A Closing Prayer
Jesus, I want to be honest about this week. It has been hard in the hardest ways — not the confusion of not knowing what’s ahead, but the wounds that come from people, and from silence, and from loss that doesn’t reverse. I have felt the weight of it. Some days I have felt it more than I have felt You.
And I’m reading today that You were in the stern the whole time. Not watching from a distance. Not waiting for me to get it together before drawing close. Already there — before I called, before I noticed, before the storm arrived.
I don’t need the storm to stop today. I just need to know that. Let it settle somewhere deeper than my understanding — that I have not been alone in any of it. That the silence was not absence. That the loss did not go unwitnessed. That the wounds from the inner circle did not catch You off guard.
You are with me. That doesn’t change the weather. It changes me. And that, I’m beginning to see, changes everything. Amen.
Week 3 begins tomorrow. The winds ahead have a different quality — not the disorientation of Week 1 or the wounds of Week 2, but something that has been building underneath both: the slow, clear-eyed recognition of what God has been doing in all of it. The tack is coming. You are more ready for it than you know.
To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: https://www.thisistheway.live/t/headwind
© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way