Your favorite escape isn't working

It's 9:47 p.m. The kids are finally down. The dishwasher's running. You collapse on the couch and tell yourself you're going to relax for ten minutes.

Forty-five minutes later you've watched seventeen Reels about a woman in Idaho who organizes her pantry by color, and you can't remember a single one.

You weren't relaxing. You were escaping.

Don't feel bad. I do it too. Different drug, same hit.

Here's something I said Sunday that I can't stop thinking about: we are escape artists. Every one of us. We've been working on our exit strategies our whole lives.

Some of us escape into work — if I just stay busy enough, I won't have to feel it. Some of us escape into a glass of wine. Or three. Some of us into the scroll. Some of us into being the strong one — the fixer, the mom who holds it all together so nobody sees her crack.

The trouble isn't that these escapes don't work. They do work — for about twenty minutes. That's the whole point. They take the edge off just long enough to make you forget you're in a storm.

And then the storm is still there.

The disciples are doing what we all do. The boat is filling up, they can't bail fast enough, and they reach for the closest thing that looks like it might save them. In their case, it was Jesus. But notice how they reached.

They didn't reach for him to hold them. They reached for him to fix it.

That's the difference. And it's the difference between most of our prayer lives and actual faith.

John Calvin said that the human heart is an idol factory — but I'd add this: it's also an escape factory. Every storm in our life trains us to ask the same question we've been asking since we were five and a thunderstorm shook the windows: How do I get out of this?

Paul David Tripp puts it bluntly. He says we don't just need help. We need rescue. Help is when someone hands you a bucket to bail with. Rescue is when someone pulls you out of the water entirely.

The disciples wanted help. Jesus gave them something they didn't even know to ask for — he gave them himself. Standing up. Speaking. Muzzling the chaos with two words. The branch that doesn't break.

And here's the gospel turn: he didn't wait for them to stop reaching for the wrong things. He didn't wait for them to get their theology straight. They were panicked, accusing, half-faithed at best — and he stood up anyway.

That's grace. Not a reward for trusting well. A rescue for people who barely know how to trust at all.

That's it. That's the whole practice. Don't try to stop the escape this week. Just notice it. Naming it is half the battle, and grace does the rest of the work.

For Reflection

1. When you feel a storm rising in your chest this week, where does your hand reach first? Be specific — name the app, the bottle, the behavior, the person.

2. What feeling is your favorite escape protecting you from? (Most of the time it's grief, fear, loneliness, or shame. Sometimes all four.)

3. The disciples reached for Jesus to fix the storm. What would it look like this week to reach for Jesus to hold you in it instead?

He's not safe. But he's good. And he's in the boat.