Please turn with me to Mark 6.
One evening during a violent thunderstorm a mom was tucking her young son Liam into bed. She was about to turn off the light when he asked with a tremor in his voice, "Mommy, will you sleep with me tonight?"
The mom smiled and gave him a reassuring hug. She said, "I can't, honey. I have to sleep in Daddy's room."
Liam thought about that for a moment, then he shook his head and said with a hint of disdain, “The big sissy."
In Mark 6, the disciples just had a mountaintop experience with the feeding of the 5,000, but things are about to change. They’re about to find themselves all alone in the middle of a storm.
One of the hardest parts of going through a storm in life is when, like Liam, you feel all alone. Maybe you don’t tell those around you, or when you do, they just can’t understand or truly sympathize with what you’re going through. You feel abandoned in the storm.
In his book entitled A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father, Augusten Burroughs writes that when he was 7, he realized that whenever he’d try to crawl onto his father's lap, his dad would push him away. He would stare at the TV and wouldn’t even look at his son.
So little Augusten started keeping a scorecard on a clipboard of how many times his dad refused to cuddle with him. He said it was close to 100%.
Hungering for his dad’s presence, the boy took one of his dad’s shirts and a pair of pants out of the closet, stuffed them with pillows, and sprayed them with his dad's cologne. At night, he would snuggle up against this mannequin dad, pretending to be held and loved.
He said one day his mom found the dummy, and simply returned the clothes to the closet, the pillows to the bed.
He said: "Over time, my father's smell faded from the pillows until there was nothing left of him at all."
Maybe going through life’s storms, and you feel all alone—like your heavenly Father has abandoned you.
How do you follow Jesus in the storm?