Learn to recognize this sign in your own life. Learn to recognize and understand the hour of the storm, when you were perishing. This is the time when God is incredibly close to you, not far away. Right there, when everything else that keeps us safe is breaking and falling down, when one after another all the things our lives depend on are being taken away or destroyed, where we have to learn to give them up, all this is happening because God is coming near to us, because God wants to be our only support and certainty. God lets our lives be broken and fail in every direction, through fate and guilt, and through this very failure, God brings us back; we are thrown back upon God alone. God wants to show us that when you let everything go, when you lose all your own security and have to give it up, that is when you are totally free to receive God and be kept totally safe in God. So may we understand rightly the hours of affliction and temptation, the hours in our lives when we are on the high seas! God is close to us then, not far away. Our God is on the cross.
--Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Overcoming Fear
Image source: Peter Paul Rubens, Christ on the Sea of Gallilee (c. 1611-1614), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calming_the_storm#/media/File:Peter_Paul_Rubens_-_Christ_on_the_Sea_of_Galilee.jpg
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