Topic: Grief and Trauma Awareness — Key Scripture: Mark 4:35-41
There’s a detail in Mark 4 that I think we skip past too quickly because we already know how the story ends.
The disciples are in a boat with Jesus when “a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking into the boat, so that the boat was already filling”. This isn’t a minor squall. Experienced fishermen, men who knew this particular sea and its moods, are convinced they’re about to die. And Jesus is asleep in the stern, undisturbed by the chaos around Him. They wake Him, half-accusing, half-desperate: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He gets up, rebukes the wind, tells the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceases. Great calm.
This is usually where the story gets preached — the miracle of a stilled storm. And it is that. But I’ve spent a lot of time recently with the part of this passage that comes right before the rebuke of the wind, because I think it’s the part that actually matters most for people carrying grief and trauma that isn’t going to be resolved by a single command.
Most grief doesn’t work like the storm in this story. It doesn’t get rebuked into instant stillness. A death doesn’t reverse. A trauma doesn’t just un-happen. A diagnosis doesn’t disappear because we prayed hard enough or had enough faith. I’ve sat with a lot of people who have quietly concluded, somewhere in their pain, that if God really cared, the storm itself would already be gone — the way it went for the disciples that night. And when it isn’t gone, when the grief keeps rolling in wave after wave, some part of them starts to wonder whether the question the disciples asked applies to them too: do you not care that I am perishing?
I want to offer a different way of reading this story, one that doesn’t depend on the literal storm disappearing. Because look again at what actually happened on that boat before the wind stopped. Jesus was asleep in the middle of the same storm that was terrifying everyone else. Not because He was unaware of the danger, but because His own internal state wasn’t being dictated by the external chaos. The wind and the waves were exactly as violent for Him as they were for the disciples.
His peace wasn’t the absence of the storm. It existed inside the storm, fully present to it, undisturbed by it.
That’s the piece I think matters most for grief and trauma that doesn’t get calmed the way the wind did. What if the miracle you actually need isn’t the storm disappearing, but your own heart and mind being brought into that same kind of undisturbed peace while the storm is still fully raging around you? What if Jesus calming you in the middle of the grief, rather than removing the grief itself, is not a lesser miracle, but the very same one He performed that night — just aimed at a different target?
I’ve watched people wait for their circumstances to change before they’ll accept that God is present in their pain — waiting for the diagnosis to reverse, the relationship to be restored, the trauma to stop replaying, before they’ll believe He cares. But I think there’s a version of this story meant specifically for the seasons when the storm doesn’t stop. Jesus didn’t need the storm to be calm in order to be at peace inside it. That kind of peace is available to us too, and it doesn’t require our external circumstances to cooperate first.
This isn’t a minimizing of real pain, and I want to be careful here. Grief and trauma are not imaginary weather that a change in perspective simply dissolves. The waves in Mark 4 were genuinely dangerous — the boat was actually filling with water. The disciples’ fear wasn’t foolish; it was a reasonable response to a real threat. In the same way, your grief is not less real because it hasn’t stopped, and your trauma isn’t less serious because it’s still active. What I’m suggesting is something different: that the presence of an unstilled storm doesn’t mean the absence of a caring, capable God. It might simply mean the miracle you need is happening somewhere other than the wind and the waves.
If you’re in a season where the storm hasn’t lifted — where the grief keeps rolling in, where the trauma hasn’t finished replaying, where nothing about your circumstances has calmed the way you hoped it would — I want you to consider a different prayer than the one that begs the wind to stop. Ask instead for what Jesus already had that night before He ever spoke to the sea: a heart and mind so anchored that the storm, real as it is, doesn’t get the final say over your internal state.
The wind may keep blowing. The waves may keep coming. But peace was never only available on the other side of a stilled storm. Sometimes it’s available in the middle of one — not instead of the miracle you were hoping for, but as a different, equally real one.
If this resonates with where you are today, BRKN Soul Care is here. Book a free Introductory Conversation at brknsoulcare.org and take the first step. You don’t have to carry this alone.