Are You Walking on Water or Sinking Like a Stone

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Let’s be honest with ourselves when we are talking about our faith. Some days you walk on water and other days you sink like a stone.  Faith invariably gives way to doubt before it again recovers its confidence, then it loses it again.

Remember the story of Peter walking on water. The story goes this way: The disciples had just witnessed a major miracle, Jesus fed more than 5000 people with five loaves of bread and two fishes. Having just witnessed a miracle, their faith was strong. Soon afterwards they get into a boat to cross a lake. Jesus is not with them. A few miles out they run into a fierce storm and begin to panic. Jesus comes walking towards them on the water. Initially they’re frightened and take him for a ghost. But he calms their fear by telling them, right from the center of the storm, that he is not just Jesus but that he is God’s very presence.

Peter is immediately buoyed up in his faith and asks Jesus to let him too walk on the water. Jesus invites him to do so and Peter gets out of the boat confidently and begins to walk on the water. But then, realizing what he was doing and the incredulous nature of it, he immediately starts to sink, cries out for help, and Jesus has to reach out and rescue him from drowning.

What we see illustrated here are two things that lie at the heart of our experience of faith, namely, that faith (literally) has its ups and downs and that it works best when we don’t confuse it with our own efforts.

Faith has its ups and downs. Our own faith works exactly like that, at times it lets us walk on water and at other times we sink like a stone. The gospel-image of Peter walking on the sea speaks for itself.

We easily get discouraged because our faith vacillates in this way. My spiritual mentor was being wheeled into surgery and he was worried, but he folded his hands and prayed: “Lord, Your will be done,” and immediately he felt a sense of peace. Faith works like that: We can walk on water only as long as we don’t think that we are doing it with our own strength.

Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends who feel like that they are sinking like a stone. Remind them that the Spirit comes into our life with a deep secret that sometimes we know, and then not, and then we know it again.  Faith works like that, some days we walk on water, other days we sink like a stone, and then later we walk on water.