Lord, Quiet the Storms in My Heart.

There are some evenings I'll do bedtime and couldn't tell you afterwards a single thing that happened in it.

I'm there for all of it. The bath, the pajamas, the stories. I say all the right things at the right times.

But underneath the parenting, there's a list running in my mind, pulling me out of the one thing I actually want to be doing, which is being present with my boys.

It's not usually one big thing.

If you asked me what was actually the matter, I'd struggle to give you an answer worth hearing, because every single item on that list is small.

A message I still haven't replied to. A form that needs filling in for one of the boys.
A bill I need to pay. An appointment I need to move.

On its own, any one of them is a five-minute job. But it's the sheer number of them, and that they keep arriving and stacking up.

I'd never have called that a storm. It sounds far too dramatic a word for an empty form or a message I haven't answered.

But a storm is never one gust of wind. There's no single giant wave, or one enormous raindrop.

It's thousands of small ones arriving at once, not one of which you'd notice on its own, but together they're enough to cause a storm.

That's much closer to how mine feels. There's no single wave, gust or raindrop I could point at and say, that one, that's the problem. There's just more water coming in than I can get out.

The disciples in Mark chapter 4 had the opposite problem. Their storm was obvious, one everyone in the boat could see and name and be rightly terrified of.

And even then, what they did with it was panic for a long time before they thought to wake the one person who could do anything about it.

When they finally did, "He rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, 'Peace! Be still!' The wind ceased and there was a great calm." (Mark 4:39).

He didn't work through it wave by wave. He didn't ask them to identify which part of the storm was the real problem.

He spoke to the whole sea, all at once, and all at once the whole sea went quiet.

Which means I don't have to go down my list and find the one item serious enough to justify a prayer. I can bring the whole lot of it, the small and the silly and the ones I'd be embarrassed to say out loud.

What I want isn't an empty list. That's never going to happen.

I just want the noise turned down enough that I'm actually in the room, doing bathtime and the stories, instead of somewhere else in my mind entirely.

And I'm learning that the calm He gives doesn't stop at my head. It goes further down, to the heart that never quite settles and the soul that's tired from carrying it.

Today, if that's you, join me in praying: Lord, quiet the storms in my heart and soul.