Liquid Days are for Walking
These are liquid days. We're trying to figure out what comes next for our family, and in that season -- one we have lived through many times before -- it feels like the floor goes fluid with potentiality. Yes, it's "bidding season," which sounds like a seasonal hunt, as if we were tipping toeing through the woods for pheasants or walnuts, but this hunt is for the next diplomatic assignment into which we will pour our actual lives. For a number of reasons, this bidding season feels like not only have the floors gone fluid, but so have the walls. I'll have to leave it as a metaphor for now.
Walking on water is something that Jesus did. Skeptics of the biblical account might snort at it being a fact, rather than a grand delusion, and, frankly, people who say they truly believe it also wouldn't venture a step out onto the local lake to imitate him without a towel on hand. The story itself isn't there to prove that "the magic of faith" gives us mind over matter so we can do anything we put our minds to. I don't totally know why it happened, to be honest. But there are profound mercies within it, and I do -- yes, unabashedly -- truly believe that Jesus walked on water.
I also truly believe that his disciple Peter did too. He took liquid steps of faith. The walking on water bit was not just a special "Jesus only" trick. Peter, along with the other disciples, were quite sanely freaked out when they saw a figure walking towards them on the water, because people don't do that, even these fishermen knew. They reasoned it had to be a ghost they were seeing because only a ghost could do something like that. But Jesus assured them that it's him and they didn't need to be afraid. Peter replied, "If it's you, tell me to come to you," and Jesus said, "Come Peter." True to his disposition, Peter gets out and starts walking on the water too.
Then a very normal dynamic of faith took hold too -- "Peter saw the wind and the waves." Wind isn't something one sees, but we can see what wind does to other objects, an unseen energy at work, churning, whipping, and howling. The unseen wind and the turbulent waves, the biblical account tells us, had already been blowing the disciples' boat, so much so that the boat itself was in trouble because of the conditions.
Peter is reliably heedless and headstrong: even in those conditions, Peter was game to move forward. But preciously, to be sure that it was Jesus, Peter says: "Tell me to come to you!" Peter was willing to go a little bit more, despite the conditions, further into faith, but he had to be called there to do it. Jesus says "Come Peter!" and he's out, off the tenuous security of the boat onto the turbulent waves of the lake. The whole scene is just wild.
And then something happened in him -- not in the waves, not in the wind, but in Peter himself. Something shifted; maybe something closed. We could call it "attention" or "focus" and that would shift something in us too, as if faith was something we could achieve or accomplish with our will or mere effort. Faith doesn't feel secure; it more often feels like profound risk.
It mattered that Peter came in response to Jesus's call. I find it equally important that Peter asked Jesus to call him out.
These are liquid days for us, and if you are a person who prays, would you lift a prayer for us? God knows what we need, and each one of us needs to hear him call. It is good to be reminded in Scripture that it is something for which we can ask, and then to walk.
Reading currently:
Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation, by Amanda Porterfield (2012)
Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience, by Anthony Steinbock (2007)
Listening to:
"Be Kind to Yourself," by Andrew Peterson
"Christ is Lower Still," by The Porter's Gate
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