the way
Bea and I have been talking, lightly, about the weather. August has felt milder than usual; we’ve already felt Fall drifting in on leaf-rustling breezes. We’ve enjoyed our thoughts of cozy things. Bea schedules transportation for the city, and she told me to ask for her by name, made up her mind to be a way-maker for my family when I need to schedule rides for my young adults. So, she and I have begun to cultivate a relationship. But there is weather talk and there is storm talk, and Bea and I have yet to really get down into the waves, to talk of the kind of weather that can flat out stop us from moving forward.
Human beings are always trying to get somewhere, and here I am on the phone now with Bea, organizing the ways my people will get where they need to go, and it can be easy, with a phone to my ear and my planner spread out on the desk and my pen tapping over a grid of days, to believe the strategizing mine, the scheduling Bea’s, that the striving driving through traffic belongs to Mr. A, who has been driving Riley back and forth to work for months. It can feel like the three of us together have become their way through the clotted, knotted roadways to the places they need to go. Meanwhile God, from the beginning, has been saying that He is the Way. This thread winds through scripture like a living river, a river often whipped up by unpredictable weather.
Over the phone line, I hear Bea’s fingers tapping against computer keys.
Bea and I agree it feels milder than usual this month, and that feels both wonderful and dreadful to say because we both know that life is waves and swells follow troughs and milder can be quickly followed by heavier and harder. Our feelings are subjective, and seasons come and go, and well, predicting and interpreting weather is, we all know, an inexact science. It’s nearly impossible to know where and when the systems of the world will unleash their worst. I recently heard a meteorologist say that even with all the advanced technologies and artificial intelligence capabilities at work today, forecasting weather can feel like lingering over popcorn kernels at the stove, wondering exactly where and when the wrecking storms will finally explode.
In the quiet dawn, as light broke past the darkness, I read from John 6, the disciples making their way—in her book, Ann Voskamp asks why we want to try always to go our own way when we have the Way–across the wind-whipped lake at night through a sudden storm. They desperately push on the oars, rain-soaked, I imagine—their cheeks, their bodies, their hair in thick, wet ropes—striving to get to the other side. Jesus was not with them and they, as terrified and overwhelmed as they were, weren’t even really looking for him. I imagine them straining into the darkness, against the wind, against the rain in their faces, searching with half-blind eyes and every ounce of energy only for land, for land, for land. They just want to get to the other side, to get out of the storm, to get where they want to go.
We’re all trying to get somewhere.
For their part, all the press of human will and effort, the disciples had only made it halfway on their own, the waves halfway overtaking the boat. This becomes that thread rushing like rapids through scripture, God underlining it in curvy blue, that He—only He—is the Way.
Our own way never takes us to the other side of a storm.
I have been marinating in this all morning, my body wading into that lake, letting myself feel the reality of the storms, listening for what God, through the writer, wants to reveal to me about Jesus.
Bea is saying, “That’s why I think Fall may actually be longer coming, maybe even into late October, because August hasn’t really felt like August.”
Bea and I follow this easy line to connection, keep speculating about the weather, but deep down we both know we have no idea, really, about any of it. It’s funny how we can make a flimsy line out of anything, but the only ties that really bind are the ones holding everything.
It is, of course, at the point of human futility—I marked this, my finger on the page–that the disciples glimpse something or someone coming toward them through the storm, unhindered by the wind and rain, striding those waves like a straight, flat path, Jesus, of course, the all-powerful, preeminent one, Jesus, the Waymaker who is, He said so Himself, the actual Way to where we want to go.
Even when we didn’t recognize Him for who He is—even when we don’t, He still comes to our rescue.
“Ah, so more heat yet, you think?” I ask Bea, turning to face the window in my office, scanning bluebird skies for secrets.
“Yeah, but that’s okay,” Bea says, her voice casually spinning out faith, “I figure whatever weather God wants to give is the right kind of weather.”
And just like that we dive, Bea and I, below the waves, where the water is always at peace.
I realized, catching the real plotline of that story in John 6, that the climax, that place where the action falls towards a resolution, is the moment when the disciples recognize Jesus and welcome Him into their boat. This is, of course, the climax of every good story, the watershed where the people trying to get somewhere, the people hindered, as we often are, by the unpredictable explosion of storms, discover their Way across, and it isn’t that the storm ends and their determination wins the day.
For me today, it is this moment when Bea turns our conversation away from all our strategizing and scheduling and planning of rides and even our speculation about the weather, all our flimsy lines, to the lifeline. We might as well have been in a boat out on a lake with the other disciples. She might as well have shifted her gaze, pointing, said, look, the Lamb of God, whatever the weather,because anyway she dove with me, beyond the circumstantial gifts to the Giver, to the Way of life.
I told you she’d made up her mind to be a waymaker, and here I’ve been wading into the river and the storm, and here she is, pointing out the actual Way through anything, even the way of faith.
Suddenly I recognize that we’re all trying to get somewhere, and the Way of peace is not ever the way we make on our own, but the Way Himself, at once below and above and through the storm, always with us. I see that getting where we need to go is never about trying harder, but instead, is always about recognizing Jesus.
That story in John 6 concludes with a crazy phrase in the text that comes without preamble or further explanation, that when the disciples, recognizing Jesus, invited Him into the boat, immediately they reached the shore where they were heading. So, the disciples push and push and push through the storm on their own, harder and harder against the oars and the rain and the wind, and for all that, they only get about halfway across that lake. But when Jesus joins them in the boat, they immediately arrive where they had desperately longed to be, because anyway, where He is, that’s where we’re always trying to go, whether we realize it or not.
“Yeah, that’s always the thing, isn’t it,” I say to Bea, “what God gives.”
I think of the disciples and their experience of storms on that lake where winds knot up from three directions (doesn’t it always seem to be coming from just about every direction), of their palpable fear. I think of all the whys we wonder when the weather turns catastrophic, how hard it is to look beyond our terror and losses to believe.
I have lived this myself, in fact, have felt the hard press tensing and electrifying my body, my muscles tightening and bringing me pain, and instead of looking for Jesus, my answer to hardship has often been to push myself harder, to make my own way. I have, in the face of uncontrollable difficulties, believed that, by sheer force of will, I could get where I’m going on my own, I could wrestle a storm to stillness. But the summation of the passage seems to be that the storm is not, cannot ever be the center of the story, nor could human effort ever bring its resolution.
Bea and I, I see it now, we’re only with the Way who walks over waves, who has authority over weather. We’re not really making way or making waves, she and I, for all our talk and typing. And whether Autumn comes or heat beats down or a storm whips everything into waves, we’ll get where we need to go, not because we push ourselves harder and better, but because He is the Way, and He has come to us.
