12B21.    Job 38:1, 8-11.     God uses his divine power to master the unruliness of nature, seen as the sea bursting forth as from the womb with wild abandon.  “When I set limits for it and fastened the bar of its door, and said: Thus far shall you come but no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stilled!”  God’s divine power overrules the power of nature.

Mark 4:35-41.     The violent squall came up.  It was not the storm that awakened Jesus but his disciples in their terror.  Jesus overpowered the storm with his quiet might.   As he rebuked the storm, he rebukes them: “Do you not yet have faith?”  In effect, he was saying, “Why do you choose to live in your own weakness and not the strength of God?”  “They were filled with great awe and said to one another, ‘Who then is this whom even wind and sea obey?’”  We can easily slip into a mode where we think of Jesus as just another person or some especially gifted human.  He was infinitely more.  We are so finite that we do have not the capability to grasp, even minutely, the awesome infinity of God.   Daily and often, we must confront ourselves as to whom our God really is by worshipping and adoring him.

2 Corinthians  5:14-17.    “The love of Christ impels us,” “so that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.”  “So whoever is in Christ is anew creation: the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come.”  Immersed in Christ through our union with him in prayer, his love for us becomes our life.  Our bodily life or this world is no longer what it is all about.  In Galatians 2:20 Paul wrote, “Yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me: insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me.”  Our lives are so radically changed when we live in Christ and not in the spirit and the ways of this world.  For we who walk in the Way of Christ, the Spirit is the breathe of life by which we live.