Proverbs 8:17

I love those who love me, and those who seek me diligently find me.

Wisdom is not hard to find or even attain, but one must pursue her. She loves those who love her and allows those who actually search for her to find her.  As Jesus instructed His followers, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened!”

Jesus does not turn anyone away who is diligently searching for Him. The same goes for wisdom. If you deeply desire it, you will obtain it.

Desire.

So much comes down to desire.

What do you really want?

I believe that if we can ask someone enough questions, they will answer with “Peace” every time. And with this, is love and joy.

A wise friend, I won’t mention his name (Luke Mertes), once said, “Jesus can only work with desire.”

That really stuck with me.  He woos us rather than forces us to love Him. In that way it is true love. Even in His infinitude, He does not violate us, tho it seems if anyone had the right to, it would be the One who gave us life.

Then another anonymous friend (Jenny Mullins) brought up the great point that God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases Him [Phi.2:13].  So there’s that seeming paradox of God choosing us and giving us desire for Him in the first place.  Perhaps you don’t have desire, but desire to have desire. Pray for it! I’d say if you ask, seek, and knock for desire for God, He will kindly grant it to you.

At the end of the day, we do what we want to do. What we’re willing to do. You will work so hard for what you want, whether it be a master’s degree, to run a marathon, to keep isolated from people…What if what you most wanted was to be a sincerely loving person? What would the training for that look like? Where would your time and energy need to go?

Matthew 8:23-27

Jesus calms a storm.

It’s interesting that the account given states that the disciples followed Jesus into the boat. Following Jesus will take us thru storms.  In the previous chapter, Jesus was ending His Sermon on the Mount with the story of the wise man who built his house upon the rock and that his house stood thru the storm because of that foundation. Scripture is clear that the stuff is gonna hit the fan in this life, even for those following Him.

But may we never forget that when these storms hit, Jesus is in the boat with us.  And the fact that He is sleeping in this account speaks to us that He is always calm and at peace, therefore a source of peace, in the middle of these storms.  So, like these disciples, we go to Him first.  Their situation here vividly shows they had nowhere else to go, no one else to turn to.  And that really is our situation all the time, we just don’t see it.  Turning somewhere else in our storms would’ve been like these disciples scrambling to build a storm shield out of pieces of the boat they tore off, or sometimes what we do is the foolish equivalent of these guys  thinking they could somehow construct a laser cannon storm destroyer so they could save themselves. Not gonna happen.

So in the midst of the crapstorm, go immediately to the one who is calm and at rest, for that will also give you peace–when you experience His peace.  We want to go to the calm person when something is hectic. My brother and brother-in-law are both paramedics. I would want them around if someone is choking, passing out, having a heart attack, etc., because they have trained themselves to remain calm in adverse situations such as these, so they can think and act and do what is needed to be done.

We can train ourselves in similar fashion as we go to Jesus every time in every adverse situation. That will become our default setting as our neurons fire accordingly to set these new pathways in the brain. We will blaze that trail.  After a while, we will remain calm and at peace when the stuff of life hits because we know who is in the boat with us, that He is at rest, and that He has power over every single storm. And we can have His peace, as long as we forsake the foolish Storm Destroyer Laser Cannon idea and go to Him.