Be Still

It is summer, and Ana — the fastest, loudest, most perpetually-in-motion of the Jones children — cannot imagine a day worth slowing down for. But one ordinary evening, worn out at last, she falls asleep and opens her eyes somewhere she has never been: a small wooden boat on a wide sea, with weather-beaten fishermen at the oars and a Man asleep in the stern. When a sudden storm turns the water to mountains and even grown men cry out in fear, Ana discovers there is one storm she cannot outrun. Then the Man stands, speaks three quiet words — “Peace, be still” — and the wind lies down at once. In the great calm that follows, the stillness reaches all the way inside the girl who is never still. 

A dream-episode about the peace the Lord gives in the very middle of the storm. Scripture: Mark 4:39 (KJV).

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 1:00

Welcome to the Jones Family Chronicles. For life at school, home and church is always full of lessons, laughter, and love. Meet Dad, the pastor's assistant, Mom, the heart of the home, and their five bright and lively kids. Allison, Addison, Anna, Ava Grace, and little Andy, who somehow always managed to turn ordinary days into extraordinary adventures. So gather round, open your heart, and let's discover together the joy of faith, family, and the timeless truths of God's Word. This is the Jones Family Chronicles. All right, kids, gather close.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

Papa has a story for you about your favorite family. The Joneses. Summer had a particular effect on Anna.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

For the long, unhurried days made Alison reach for a schedule and Ava Grace reach for a quiet corner. They seemed to hand Anna an extra and entirely unnecessary supply of energy. She woke with the sun and hit the floor already moving, and from that moment the day became a thing to be chased rather than merely lived. There was a great deal to do in Anna's estimation, and never quite enough hours in which to do it loudly. By the time this particular day had run itself out, Anna had circled the backyard more times than anyone could count, told a long and complicated story to the neighbor's patient dog through a gap in the fence, and put roughly forty questions to her mother before lunch had even been cleared. She did not walk through her days so much as launch herself into them, both hands first, which was why it always took her by surprise when the running finally ran out. It happened at supper. One moment Anna was talking about the dog or the shoes or a plan involving the garden hose that Mom had gently declined, and the next she had gone quiet over her plate, blinking slowly, her words arriving softer and farther apart. Sounds like somebody's ready for bed, Mom said in the gentle voice she saved for exactly this hour. I'm not tired, said Anna, who was extremely tired. When at last her head found the pillow, the house had gone quiet around her in the good way, the settled hush that comes over a home at the end of a full day, when the dishes are done and the lamps are low and even the floorboard seemed to be resting. For once in her waking life, Anna was perfectly still. Not because she was trying to be, and not because anyone had told her to, simply because for the first time all day there was nothing left to run toward. She closed her eyes, and the world tilted softly beneath her. The way a boat does when it slips its mooring and eases out from the shore. When Anna opened her eyes, she was not in her bed. She was sitting in a boat, a real one, old and sturdy, its wood worn smooth by years of hands, rocking gently under her in a way that was somehow not frightening at all. The air smelled of salt and evening. The sky had gone the deep, soft purple of a day folding itself up, and the water stretched away in every direction, wide and calm and silver, where the last of the light lay across it. There were men in the boat with her, half a dozen of them, fishermen by the look of their rough hands and their easy way with the ropes. And here was a strange dream thing. Not one of them seemed surprised to find a small girl among the nets, as though she had always belonged there and they were glad of her company. At the front a man was speaking. Anna could not see his face clearly in the dimming light, but she heard his voice, and his voice was the kind you stop and listen to. Let us pass over and to the other side, he said. And though Anna had never heard that voice before in all her life, something inside her settled at the sound of it, the way a restless room settles when the right person walks in. The men leaned into the oars and the boat slid out across the water as the shore drew back behind them. For a little while there was nothing in all the world but the dip of the oars and the lap of the water, and the great purpling sky coming down to meet the sea. Anna trailed her fingers in the cool dark water and decided she had never been anywhere so peaceful. She ought to have known, being Anna, that the peace would not last. It began with a single gust, just one, enough to snap the sail taut and lift the hair off the back of Anna's neck. Then another harder, and then the way weather turns on open water with nothing to stand in its way, the wind came up all at once. It came down off the hills and out across the sea like something that had been let loose, howling, flattening the tops of the waves and flinging the spray sideways. The soft purple sky bruised over into a low and ugly gray. The calm silver water she had been trailing her fingers in only minutes before heaved itself up into hills, and then mountains dark and impossibly tall. The boat climbed one of them, hung for a sickening instant at the very top and dropped down the far side. Anna's stomach dropped right along with it, and she grabbed the edge of the boat with both hands and held on. The waves grew. They began to break over the sides now, slopping cold sea water into the bottom of the boat faster than anyone could throw it back out. And the fishermen, who had been so calm and so capable, were not calm anymore. They shouted to one another over the winds. Words Anna could not make out. They hauled at the ropes and fought the sail, and one of them knelt in the rising water and bailed with the bare cupped hands, and the look on his face told Anna plainly that it was not working and that he knew it was not working. Anna had been frightened before, of the dark of thunder, but never like this. She, who could not sit still through a single quiet supper, was clinging now to a wet plank of wood, and the worst part, the part that turned her cold all the way through, was that there was nowhere to run. She always ran. Running was what she did with a feeling too big to hold. But there was no running here, only water in every direction, and more of it coming in, and the awful tilting dark. The storm she realized was everything she usually was. It was loud, it was fast, it was everywhere at once. Only now all of it was on the outside of her instead of the inside, and it was trying with all of its might to swallow the little boat hole. We're going to sink, one of the men cried out, and Anna, looking at the water rising cold around her ankles, believed him completely. And then through the spray and the noise and the pitching dark, Anna saw something she could not understand. In the very back of the boat in the stern, where the wind was wildest and the spray came most, the man was asleep. Asleep. His head rested on a cushion, and the boat heaved and the water crashed and the men around him shouted for their lives, and through every bit of it he slept on, as peacefully as a child who has finally run himself out at the end of a long summer day. Anna stared at him. How? she thought. How can anyone sleep through this? It seemed almost unfair that there could be so much calm so close at hand while everyone else was coming apart. The men were thinking the same thing. At last one of them gave up on the ropes and the bailing and stumbled to the back of the boat, and he took the sleeping man by the shoulder and woke him, his voice cracking right down the middle with fear. Master he cried, carest thou not that we perish? The man opened his eyes, and Anna, watching, saw that there was no fear in them at all. He did not bolt upright, he did not grab for a rope. He looked at the storm, at the wind and the wild water and the white faced men around him, the way a person might look at a child who was simply gotten a little bit too loud and needs only to be told kindly to settle down. Then he stood up, in a boat that was pitching and rolling in a wind that had been knocking grown fishermen off their feet. The man simply rose and stood, steady and unhurried, as though the heaving deck beneath him was as solid as a stone floor. He looked out at the wind, he looked out at the waves, and he spoke to them. Not to the men, not to Anna, but to the storm itself, as if it were something that could hear him and would mind. Peace, he said, be still. That was all. Three words. And he did not even raise his voice to say 'em. And the wind stopped, not slowly, not bit by bit, the way storms usually wear themselves out all at once, as though the wind had only ever been waiting for permission to rest, and had been told at last that it could. The howling fell away into nothing, the sail went slack, the waves, which a heartbeat before had been mountains, sank back into themselves and smoothed out flat and shining, and took the whole sea lay as still as glass. The great calm all at once so complete and so sudden that it was almost louder than the storm had been. For a long moment nobody in the boat moved or spoke. The only sound was the soft lap of water against the hull, and somewhere far across the quiet sea the single call of a bird. Anna looked at the flat shining water. She looked at the fishermen, frozen where they stood, their mouths open and their eyes enormous. And she looked at the man, who had already sat back down, calm as anything, as though he had done nothing more remarkable than close a window against a draught. The man looked around at the men, and when he spoke his voice was gentle, not angry. Why are ye so fearful? How is it that ye have no faith? No one answered him. They did not seem to know how. They looked at one another and they looked at him, and finally one of them said in a hushed and wondering voice, the thing all of them were thinking What manner of a man is this that even the wind and the sea obey him? But Anna, small Anna, sitting among the nets with the seawater still cold around her ankles, found that she already knew the answer. She could not have said how she knew it. She only knew it all the way down to the bottom of herself. This was the one the wind that listened to. This was the one who could say to a roaring storm the very same three words her own dad said to her on the wildest nights be still, and have the whole shouting world go quiet and do exactly as it was told. As the great calm lay over the water, that same stillness began to settle over Anna too. It had started in her chest in the very place where the fear had been only a moment before, and spread out slow and warm and unhurried until even her hands, which were always, always moving, lay quiet and folded in her lap. She had spent her whole life thinking that stillness was something a person ran out of the flat, empty tiredness left over when you had finally used up all of your running. But this was nothing like that. This stillness was not empty at all, it was full. It was the deep and settled quiet that comes not because everything around you has stopped, but because someone who loves you is in the boat, and he is not afraid. And so you do not have to be afraid either. Be still, Anna whispered to herself, trying the words on like something that might fit. And if he could be that still in the very heart of the storm, she thought, then maybe someday so could she. Somewhere between the calm water and the wide, quiet sky, the dream loosened its hold and began gently to let her go.

SPEAKER_00 16:00

Anna opened her eyes.

SPEAKER_01 16:03

She was in her own bed, the blanket tucked up under her chin exactly where it had been, the morning light coming soft and gold through the curtains. The house was waking up around her in all its ordinary music, mom moving in and out of the kitchen, a door easing shut somewhere down the hall, the small determined patter of Andy's feet. For a moment Anna did not move. She did not bounce up, and she did not launch herself head first into the day, the way she had launched herself into every other morning of her life. She simply lay there a little while, holding on to the quiet she had carried back with her, cupping it carefully the way you might carry water in two hands as though not to spill it.

SPEAKER_00 16:49

The storm was over, but the still part had stayed. And then slowly Anna smiled.

SPEAKER_01 16:59

It was Sunday and after breakfast, the Jones family set out for church together on foot, the way they did on a long summer morning. The little ones out ahead and the bigger ones trailing behind. Their way took them past Brother Thompson's house, and there he was on the porch in his good Sunday shirt, with Sister Beverly settled in the second chair beside him and pickles stretched out between the two of them, chin on his paws and one ear hopefully raised. The pair of them rose and fell into step with the family for the rest of the walk, talking low and easy, in no particular hurry. Anna, it should be said, usually had a great deal to contribute to the walk to church. This morning, she mostly listened. She watched the wind in the tops of the trees, just a little wind, the ordinary kind, and she thought about a far bigger wind and about the three quiet words that had laid it flat. They seemed to her like very good words to keep. You're awfully still this morning, busy girl, Mom said, looking down at her. Because a mother always notices when the loudest of her children goes quiet. I had a dream, Anna said about a boat. And then she left it there, which, for Anna, who normally told the story until there was nothing left of it, was the most surprising thing of all. That evening, gathered in the front room with the windows open to the cooling dark, Dad reached for the Bible that was never far from him, and said he wanted to read them something. He turned to the Gospel of Mark to the fourth chapter and read aloud, and Anna sat up very straight because she knew this story. She had been there. He read about the boat the evening and the great storm of wind, and then the part Anna had been waiting for. And he arose and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, peace be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. He let that sit in the quiet room for a moment. Then he read what came next. And he said unto them, Why are ye so fearful? How is it that ye have no faith? It's a true story, Dad said, closing the book over his thumb. It really happened on a real sea to real men in a real boat. And the same Lord, who could say peace be still to that storm, can say it to the ones inside of us too. The fear, the worry. The night you cannot seem to slow your own heart down. He looked, without quite meaning to at Anna. He is not the least bit afraid of our storms. He just stands up in the middle of them. Anna, who had told no one the whole of her dream, felt something go warm and certain all over her. Later, when she told the whole thing to Papa sitting in the armchair, she told it the way she told everything, fast and tumbling and all at once. But when she came to the three words she slowed all the way down.

SPEAKER_00 20:29

He just said peace be still, Anna said. And it did. Papa nodded slowly.

SPEAKER_01 20:39

He still says it, he said. To wind, to water and then more gently to little girls with storms on the inside. Ava Grace had been listening from the floor, where she was lining her crayons up in a careful row. She looked up at Anna, considered the matter with all the seriousness she could muster, and said he can do that to the inside of you too. Then she went back to her crayons. The most important thing in the room said in the fewest possible words, exactly as she always did. And Andy, who had been holding his little drum and would, on any other evening, have been banging it with great enthusiasm, set it down instead. He climbed up onto the couch beside Anna and leaned his whole small weight against her, and the two of them sat there together perfectly still for one entire unhurried minute. Drums, Andy said, which was perhaps his own small amen. Mom and Dad looked around at all the gathered faces at the lamp light, and the open windows and the children settled close. And they smiled. Now who's ready for brownies?