Tag: peace

I AM With You

The freeway rushed toward us as I gripped the steering wheel with sweaty hands, reminding myself to just keep breathing while repeating God’s promise: “Fear not, for I am with you.”

A few days earlier, my husband had noticed a painful red lump on his calf. Since we were expecting overnight guests, he drove himself to the emergency room. Hours later he returned with the diagnosis—a ten-inch blood clot near the surface of his leg—and a prescription for blood thinners.

By Sunday afternoon his face was flushed with fever, and his blood pressure had climbed dangerously high. A resource nurse told him to return to the ER immediately—but not to drive himself. Then she added words no reluctant driver wants to hear: “Tell your wife that if you pass out, she needs to pull over and call 911.”

Driving has always been stressful for me. I can get lost in a closet, and because of my Essential Tremors, my late husband gradually took over most of the driving years ago. But now my navigator sat beside me as the patient. An hour later we safely reached the hospital. Seven hours, several blood draws, and countless anxious moments later, Don was finally released with antibiotics. Exhausted, hungry, and both feeling miserable, we gratefully found an all-night McDonald’s drive-through on the way home.

For some time I’ve wondered what God means when He repeatedly says, “Fear not, for I am with you.”

So, He is with me. Now what?

Knowing He is present doesn’t automatically stop my hands from shaking or my stomach from tightening. My body doesn’t seem to get the memo. Fear still feels like a punch to the gut.

So I began talking with God about it and searching His Word. We all experience fear. Mine may not be yours, but every one of us knows what it feels like to have our thoughts race and our hearts pound. The question isn’t whether fearful circumstances will come, but where we look when they do.

Isaiah 41:10 says,

“Fear not, for I am with you.”

God doesn’t say, “Fear not because life will be easy.” He doesn’t promise we’ll avoid suffering, uncertainty, or loss. Instead, He offers something remarkable—His presence.

If His repeated answer to fear is, “I am with you,” then His presence must somehow be the antidote.

But what does that actually look like?

I thought of Joshua. God asked him to do the impossible—to lead a nation, cross the Jordan River, defeat giants, and conquer fortified cities. Again and again God told him, “Be strong and courageous.” Why? “For the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” Joshua’s courage didn’t come from confidence in himself. It came from confidence in God’s presence.

Then there is Peter.

He actually stepped out of the boat and walked on water. The storm didn’t change. Jesus didn’t leave. Peter’s attention changed. Fear entered when Peter began interpreting reality through the storm instead of through Jesus. The only thing that shifted was his focus. Yet even then, Jesus immediately stretched out His hand. Peter’s failure never separated him from Christ’s presence.

Finally, a light began to dawn.

I think I had assumed that God’s words, “Fear not, for I am with you,” meant the frightening thing would disappear. But He never actually promises that.

When we hear, “God is with you,” perhaps we’re secretly expecting the sentence to continue: “So you won’t hurt.”

Scripture seems to mean something very different:

“So you won’t be alone.”

Those are two entirely different promises.

One removes suffering.

The other transforms suffering.

Throughout Scripture, God’s greatest gift is never first His protection, provision, or miracles.

It’s Himself.

Think about it.

To Moses: “My Presence will go with you.”

To Joshua: “As I was with Moses, so I will be with you.”

To Isaiah: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.” Not if, but when.

To David: “Though I walk through the valley…You are with me.” David is still walking through the valley.

To the frightened disciples, Jesus didn’t calm the storm immediately. First, He was in the boat.

And to us, Jesus’ final promise wasn’t, “You’ll have easy lives.”

It was, “I am with you always.”

At first that almost sounds disappointing.

We want changed circumstances.

God offers His companionship within those circumstances.

In the quiet moments, when there are no answers and no quick solutions, I have discovered that God’s greatest gift is not an explanation but His presence. Sometimes the deepest comfort comes simply from knowing that I do not sit in the silence alone.

Like Jesus’ illustration of the wind, we cannot physically see God’s presence, but we often see its effects—a peace that doesn’t make sense, strength that arrives just when we need it, words we didn’t know we had, endurance beyond our own resources, hope that survives devastating loss.

Not the absence of pain…

but the presence of Someone within it.

The psalmist understood this.

“I will be glad and rejoice in Your love, for You saw my affliction and knew the anguish of my soul” (Psalm 31:7).

“The LORD is near to the brokenhearted” (Psalm 34:18).

Yet how quickly we forget.

Fear doesn’t usually grow because God has moved. It grows because our awareness shifts—like Peter looking at the waves, like Israel staring at the giants, like us gazing at our circumstances instead of glancing at them and fixing our eyes on God.

Fear asks,

“What if?”

Faith quietly answers,

“Even there.”

What if I lose my health?

Even there.

What if I lose someone I love?

Even there.

What if I fail?

Even there.

What if I don’t know what comes next?

Even there.

Psalm 139 reminds us there is nowhere we can go where God is not already present.

Perhaps God’s presence is less like an anesthetic and more like a hand to hold.

A mother holding the hand of her frightened child during a vaccination doesn’t remove the needle. The child still cries. The pain is still real. But everything changes because someone loving is there—not to prevent every hurt, but to bear it with the child.

God has never promised a life without storms.

He has promised something infinitely better.

“I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

“I am with you always.”

Fear may still knock.

Storms may still come.

Darkness may still fall.

But none of those can change the greatest reality of all.

Immanuel. God with us.

His gracious presence is His greatest gift.

And that is enough.

Posted on by MarJean Knaak 0

When Good Fruit Must Fall

While I walked through the peach orchards a few weeks ago, I noticed hundreds, maybe thousands, of small green peaches lying on the ground. It seemed so wasteful until I understood the purpose. My farmer husband told me the growers thin the fruit so that what remains will grow larger.

It made me think about how God often needs to thin out our lives as well. Last year I wrote a blog to you about pruning branches, which can relate more to sin, and my blog from Hebrews 12 about laying aside every weight and the sin that so easily entangles us. This peach thinning insight goes beyond simply pruning sin. Many of us think of thinning as God removing bad things from our lives. But often He removes good things that compete with better things. The peach tree is not being punished. It is being prepared to produce quality fruit.

In 2005 we joined an Alaskan mission and wrote Courage letters to our support base. In one letter I penned a poem that is not about thinning peaches, but it is about being so busy that our fruitfulness never comes to maturity.

A Rhyming Reason to Refocus

Right in the middle of a very busy day,
I took a hurried moment to bow my head and pray.
I would have run off quickly
But something seemed to say, “Be still.

“Your intensely flustered flurry,
Your pressured heat and hurry,
Your anxious wiles and worry only serve
To disconnect you from the Vine!

“Do you think that you can make it?
That your intellect can shake it?
That your strength can really make it
Happen in your time?

“Can a branch produce a cluster
With a glowing healthy luster
Without the Vine to muster up
Its sweetest wine?

“For your fruit comes not by straining,
But by gentle, quiet waiting
On the One whose living water
Fills your soul.

“Child, be still and listen to Me
Whisper peace that will come through Me
As you give the time that’s due Me
From yourself.”

So I listened and I waited
On the One who so had stated
That His peace was under-rated
In my mind.

All the while my work was calling,
And I hesitated stalling,
For it seemed the sky was falling
And I’d never finish all I had to do.

Yet as I sat there stewing
About all that needed doing,
A gentle peace began its brewing
In my soul.

Slowly He began the changing
With a quiet rearranging
By exchanging my poor thinking
For His own.

All that mattered was His nearness,
Which I saw with renewed clearness,
And He changed me to be fearless
In His love.

There my busy day was brighter
And my to-do list seemed much lighter
As I found that as a writer
I’m renewed!

As I reread that poem twenty years later, standing among those peach trees, I realized the lesson had been there all along.

The peaches scattered across the orchard floor were not diseased fruit. They were not bad peaches. In fact, they were perfectly healthy young peaches. Yet if they all remained on the tree, none would reach their full potential. The tree’s energy would be divided among too many competing demands.

The grower understands what the tree itself cannot.

Sometimes less fruit now produces better fruit later.

Jesus spoke of a similar process in our lives:

“Every branch that does bear fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit” (John 15:2).

Notice that He is not pruning dead branches in this verse. He is pruning fruitful ones.

That truth can be unsettling.

We readily understand why God removes sinful habits, unhealthy relationships, or destructive patterns. But what about the good things? What about worthwhile projects, meaningful commitments, enjoyable activities, and even ministry opportunities?

Sometimes God lovingly removes things that are good because they are competing with what is best.

Hebrews 12:1 instructs believers to “lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily entangles us.” The writer makes a distinction between weights and sins. Some things are sinful and must be abandoned. Other things are simply weights. They may not be wrong, but they slow us down in our pursuit of Christ.

A peach tree does not need diseased fruit removed in order to be thinned. It simply has too much fruit.

How often is that true of us?

We crowd our calendars, fill our minds, multiply our commitments, and then wonder why our spiritual fruit seems small and immature. We strain harder, work longer, and push ourselves further, while the Master Gardener quietly invites us to release something.

Not because He wants less fruit.

Because He wants better fruit.

Love that runs deeper.

Joy that lasts longer.

Peace that remains steady.

Patience that endures hardship.

Faith that has been tested and proven genuine.

The thinning may feel like loss for a season. Opportunities pass. Plans change. Certain dreams are delayed or even surrendered. Yet the Gardener sees what we cannot. He knows which peaches must fall so that the remaining fruit can grow sweet and mature.

Perhaps that is why David wrote, “One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after…” (Psalm 27:4).

One thing.

Not twenty things.

Not a hundred worthy pursuits.

One thing.

We see the same principle in the story of Martha and Mary:

“Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed…” (Luke 10:41-42).

Martha wasn’t doing bad things. She was doing good things. Jesus simply pointed her toward the better thing.

The mature Christian life is often less about adding more and more and more, and more about allowing God to narrow our focus until Christ Himself becomes our chief desire.

The peaches on the orchard floor reminded me that God’s thinning is never punishment. It is preparation. The hand that removes is the same hand that nourishes. And the fruit He leaves behind will be all the sweeter because of what He chose to take away.

The next time I walk through the peach orchards, I doubt I’ll see waste lying on the ground. I’ll see the wisdom of the grower. What once appeared to be loss is actually an investment in sweetness yet to come.

And perhaps when God removes something from my own life—a dream, an opportunity, a responsibility, or simply a season that has ended—I will remember those little green peaches beneath the trees and trust the hand of the Master Gardener.

He is not reducing fruitfulness.

He is preparing it.

And perhaps that is why His invitation remains the same today as it was twenty years ago:

“Child, be still and listen to Me…”

For sometimes the sweetest fruit grows not from our striving, but from our abiding.

Posted on by MarJean Knaak 6

When Thoughts Become Weights

Sometimes the struggles that weigh on us the most are not circumstances, but thoughts—thoughts that return again and again like waves against the same shoreline. I didn’t realize how much those rolling and crashing waves were shaping my spiritual life until a simple ocean photograph, a painting, and a few Bible word studies began to reveal something deeper.

What started as a quiet question about my own restless thoughts became an unexpected journey into what Scripture says about the heart, the mind, the soul, and the thoughts that move through us. And strangely enough, the crashing waves along the rocky coast of Cambria helped me see it more clearly than ever before.

About a year ago, I was delighted when Don took me to Cambria, a lovely coastal town just north of Morro Bay. We walked along the boardwalk taking photos, trying to capture the beauty of waves exploding against rocks, and powerful swirling waters.

We had only been married about a year. It was the beginning of the second chapter of our lives, now together, and God had given us a Scripture that felt like a shield of protection for this new season.

Isaiah 43:18–19 says:

“Forget about what’s happened; don’t keep going over old history. Be alert, be present. I’m about to do something brand-new. It’s bursting out! Don’t you see it? There it is! I’m making a road through the desert, rivers in the badlands.”

It was a perfect Scripture for our marriage.

Yet I struggled to follow those wonderful directives.

Instead of leaving the past behind, I found myself wanting to know everything about it. I sorted through hundreds of Don’s old photographs. Some stirred warm appreciation for the life that had shaped him. Others surfaced unexpected emotions. At the same time, I missed my family back in Washington and Alaska and felt the distance from everything familiar.

The past was not as easy to “forget” as Isaiah seemed to suggest.

Recently, I asked ChatGPT to transform one of our Cambria ocean photos into an oil painting. The result was beautiful. As I looked at the image, I was drawn to another passage of Scripture—Hebrews 12:1:

“Let us lay aside every weight and the sin that so easily entangles.”

The word weight caught my attention.

The weight I felt was not necessarily a visible burden. It was the constant swirl of thoughts—thoughts about our pasts, thoughts that revisited old questions, thoughts that replayed memories again and again. They tangled around my spiritual feet and made it difficult to walk freely in the joy of the Lord.

I prayed often for contentment and gratitude. Those prayers were answered—but only in small increments.

Then one day as I studied the ocean painting, something struck me. The large rocks rising from the water reminded me of the past. The waves crashing against them were like my emotions—constantly returning, colliding with what could not be changed.

The rocks were immovable.

No matter how much the water surged, the rocks remained.

That picture stirred something in me, and I decided it was time to face the issue directly. I opened my online Bible study tool, Blue Letter Bible, and began an investigation. First, I searched for the word thoughts. Then I searched for mind, soul, and heart.

Then I gathered those passages together and asked ChatGPT to help summarize the themes I was seeing. The Scriptures themselves were clear—the Bible has a great deal to say about our thoughts, our mind, our soul, and especially our heart.

What I discovered surprised me.

The Bible speaks often about our thoughts, but it rarely treats them as the deepest center of who we are. Thoughts are described as something that can wander, multiply, accuse, imagine, or be taken captive.

Thoughts are real, but they are not the deepest part of the human person.

Scripture points instead to the heart.

The heart, in biblical language, is the core of our inner life—the place where desires, choices, trust, and devotion reside. Proverbs tells us, “Guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” Jesus said that what comes out of a person originates from the heart. Paul prayed that believers would have the “eyes of their heart enlightened.”

In other words, the heart is the true control center.

The mind processes understanding.
The soul expresses our living self.
Thoughts move through our awareness.

But the heart directs the whole person.

Suddenly, my Cambria painting began to make more sense.

The waves in the painting were like my thoughts—constantly moving, sometimes calm, sometimes crashing. The rocks represented the unchangeable realities of the past. But the ocean itself—the deeper body beneath the waves—reminded me of something deeper still.

The heart.

Waves may thrash on the surface, but the deeper ocean remains steady.

This realization changed something for me.

My problem was not that thoughts existed. Thoughts naturally come and go, just like waves on the sea. The problem was that I had been allowing those waves to define the condition of my heart.

Hebrews 12 suddenly sounded different.

“Lay aside every weight.”

Perhaps the weight was not the existence of thoughts themselves, but the habit of carrying them, rehearsing them, and letting them entangle my steps.

When I looked again at the Cambria painting, I saw something new. The waves were still crashing. The rocks were still there. But the scene was not chaotic after all. It was simply the nature of the ocean.

Waves move.

Rocks remain.

But beneath it all lies a vast and steady depth.

God was gently reminding me that He works at that deeper level. He does not merely quiet the waves of passing thoughts; He renews the heart itself.

And when the heart rests in Him, the waves lose their power to entangle our steps.

The past may remain like those rocks along the shoreline—real, visible, unmovable. But the grace of God creates something stronger than the waves that crash against them.

The waves may keep moving, but they no longer decide the direction of my heart.

A new heart.

And from that renewed heart flows something I had been asking God for all along:

contentment, gratitude, and the quiet joy of walking forward into the “brand-new” work He promised.

Artist’s Reflection

The Cambria ocean painting became more than a memory of a beautiful coastal walk. It turned into a visual reminder of the spiritual journey God was taking me through.

The rocks in the painting represent the past—real events and memories that cannot be removed or rewritten. They stand firm along the shoreline of our lives.

The waves represent our thoughts and emotions. They move constantly. Sometimes they are calm and gentle; other times they surge with surprising force. Left unchecked, they can repeatedly crash against the same places in our hearts.

But the ocean itself is deeper than the waves.

Then there is the sun shining across the sea and the sea reflecting its light and beauty. Hebrews 12:2 says, “Fixing our eyes on Jesus.” The Son of God, the Light of the world, the Way, the Truth, the Life! He is our focus and shines the light of His truth across all the waves of our lives so everything reflects His glory. The sun represents Him revealing Himself to us through all our circumstances, past, present. and future.

God does not promise to erase every memory or prevent every passing thought. Instead, He invites us to anchor our hearts in Him. Beneath the surface movement of thoughts, He forms a deeper, steadier life within us.

When our hearts are settled in Him, the waves lose their power to entangle our steps.

The rocks may remain, but the ocean belongs to God.

Posted on by MarJean Knaak 4