walking on water
I see God everywhere on the coast. I talk to Him, standing at the water’s edge watching, listening, feeling. “You gather all this into jars (Psalm 33:7). You alone rule over the surging sea (Psalm 89:9)…
The seas have lifted up, LORD,
the seas have lifted up their voice;
the seas have lifted up their pounding waves.
Mightier than the thunder of the great waters,
mightier than the breakers of the sea—
the LORD on high is mighty (Psalm 93: 3,4)
I can’t help it. Whenever I’m here, there’s this whole private recitation of poetry, this wonder that absorbs me. And I always think about walking on water, so somehow it’s appropriate that we chose that lesson for the kids’ Bible class on Sunday.
It’s funny to me sometimes the way that phrase—walks on water—is used to describe what we’re not. Oh, come on. It’s not like he walks on water or anything. And anytime we want to describe too much adoration, it’s he treats her like she walks on water, our heads shaking back and forth. Of all the miracles of scripture, this one seems to raise the most eyebrows, save maybe the notion of resurrection. Not that any of us could imagine a chronic illness or lifelong blindness gone with one touch, much less all that pain slipping away the moment we touch the threads of His cloak with our fingers.
But this morning I walked out of my room and Riley rushed over to me, her arms spread wide. “Good morning, Mom!” she gushed, a smile lighting up her face, reaching all the way to her eyes. She gives the best hugs. Out in the ocean, she floats next to me, asking me thousands of questions about what I was like, what life was like, when I was a child. She talks to me about what she might do as a teenager, and when she’ll be a teenager, and how old I’ll be when she’s a teenager, and “Mom, I don’t know who I’ll marry,” and “When will I be able to drive?”
Don’t you see? She walks on water.
I still remember how she was at three, when she couldn’t look at my eyes, when she reached for things and grunted but would not, could not, call them by name. I still remember the way she would line up her toys in rows but seemed unable to play with them. I remember the first sentence she spoke: “I want to go outside.” She was four. I remember when I had to remind her, the way I remind Adam now, that hugs happen with two arms and a squeeze. I remember when she screamed and wept when everything sounded too loud. Now she wrinkles her brow and puts her hands over her ears and says, “That’s too loud. It hurts my ears.” Sometimes the singing in the auditorium at church is still too much for her. She looks over at me without saying a word, her hands on her ears, slow tears slipping over her cheeks. On the way home, she and I discuss how we will get her ear plugs, how I’ll keep them in my purse for her, and I do.
She walks on water. She has for a while. But still sometimes I get distracted by the wind and the waves around us.
Do you know the story of scripture and all this walking on water? It all really comes down to eye contact, which is maybe why it resonates so much with me, but it happened like this (Matthew 14):
Darkness. Nothing else to see, except the lines in their faces. Waves lifting and dropping them, each one with a grip on the boat and a hand pulling hair out of his eyes and mouth. Weariness, so heavy it must have made them ache, and then, fear. Fear that made them shout. Sometimes life overwhelms and scares me so much I want to shout too.
It had been a long day, a day that began with the news of the murder of an eccentric man many of them had followed, a man who lived in the desert eating locusts and gathering wild honey with his fingers. John had pointed and shouted at men with standing, men with wide phylacteries and tassels, men who walked steadily and expected respect. He had not ever backed down when it came to Truth, and for that he’d been thrown into prison. His head had been carried into a banquet hall on a platter on Herod’s birthday. Men had come, dust from John’s grave still on their hands, to tell Jesus that his cousin—the bold one who’d called after him, “Look! The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,” the one who’d said, “I’m not worthy to untie the thongs of his sandals,” the one who had baptized Jesus even though he maintained that Jesus should baptize him instead, that man—had been killed.
So Jesus had done what He always did when He needed time to reach for God. He climbed in a boat. He took them all with Him, the heaviness of the news suffocating them still, and “withdrew by boat to a solitary place.” But the people needed their teacher, their healer, and they beat their feet into the dusty roads and assembled as a crowd before Jesus and the disciples ever stepped off their boat into the shallows. The Master had too much compassion to tell the people He was tired and would they please come back another day. He healed them, taught them, and then, despite the exhausted urging of his disciples, He even fed them all—more than five thousand of them—multiplying a little boy’s lunch that Andrew had discovered at the last minute.
When the satiated crowd began to drift away, Jesus had sent His disciples back to the boat. “Go on ahead of me to the other side,” He’d said, looking off to some far away space on the mountain. “I’ll catch up.” They obeyed, wearily welcoming the familiar bounce of the boat in the current, figuring that at least the journey back across the water would offer them some peace. They would go slowly, and wait for Jesus. They had not counted on the wind.
They probably talked about what they’d just seen–how two fish and five loaves of bread had somehow been more than enough in His hands for thousands. They probably stared off into the darkness, not quite able to believe that the odd, powerful, fearless John was gone for good. They’d hardly had a chance to talk to Jesus about what had happened, though maybe He’d comforted them a bit on the first journey across.
By the time the God-man came to them, the night had reached it’s clearest hours, the time when no pretense remains, when one day is but a fading shadow and the next has hardly yet been born. Sometime after three in the morning, the wind blew so hard that the boat rocked and the waves smacked against its sides. If they’d been dozing, the wind roused them to alertness, and the knowledge that they were still alone, that Christ had not returned. They strained their eyes into the darkness, looking for him, and at last, they saw a ghost. Or so they thought. I wonder what He looked like to them, walking to them on the water, and if someone gasped, “Is it John?” Perhaps somewhere down deep they began to understand that they would one day lose Him too. Maybe that’s what made them shudder and cry out in fear. I’ve never been able to imagine what this life would be like if He weren’t with me.
I always imagine that they saw the faintest billowing of white robes, caught up in the wind, as I think of him strolling steadily toward them on top of the waves. The wind had whipped up with such force that it had pushed them a good distance away from the place where they’d left Him.
I thought about that wind one day this week when the kids and I were on the shore. The tide was low, but the waves rolled in on top of each other, side ways, churning up armfuls of sea foam. The water melted into the sand in one long roiling white cap after another. I took my board and waded in with the kids, but the wind and the waves were so strong that we could barely move against them. Back on the shore, the water gave up sharks’ teeth by the handfuls. Standing there, I thought, “What would it have been like to walk on this water in this wind?
So, the disciples sat there in the boat, or stood, or leaned, their pale faces registering fear and wonder at what they saw—the flutter of white in the darkness, moving on top of the water, not in it. He walked on strong, mighty waves, not water that looks like glass. They cried out, but knowing their hearts as He always did, He already knew they were scared. He called to them, “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.” I can’t count the number of times He’s whispered the same words into the heart of my fear.
Never mind that these men had just seen him feed all those people with a boy’s lunch, this walking on the water was a new thing. It was His voice, but Peter was not gullible. “Lord, if it’s you, tell me to come to you on the water,” Peter called back, figuring that some ghost might be able to float over the water, but only Jesus could make it so that he, regular-human Peter, could walk on it too.
“Come,” Jesus said. I can almost see Him smiling into the night, that wind tossing His hair into the sky around His head.
I wonder: Did the water give any at all when Peter threw his legs over the side of the boat? Were the bottoms of his feet wet? What an odd sensation that must have been, when the water held step after step after step as Peter moved closer to the Lord. Then Peter saw the wind (that phrase is actually part of the text—“when he saw the wind”), noticing it all over again. He saw the waves. Just for an instant, he thought, as I’ve often thought, “There’s no way I can do this,” and then he started sinking.
Evaluations—medical, developmental, psychological, academic—have been a regular part of our world since the day Riley was diagnosed with autism. It was, after all, an evaluation that brought us the diagnosis. I hate evaluations. They’re the wind.
Nearly a year ago now, I sat in a neuropsychologist’s office while she listed for me things Riley would most likely never be able to do. She pointed at numbers on a page, told me that Riley can’t, can’t, and doesn’t. She encouraged me to pull back on some of the things we allowed Riley to do, to insist on this and that, to prepare myself that Riley couldn’t. Every word was a wave. The conversation dropped me so quickly I felt sick. I left the office sinking, gripping the steering wheel, chanting “God is bigger, God is bigger, God is bigger.”
I’ve often said I wish these evaluations included a record of progress, an astounding list of miraculous things my children have achieved that no one would ever have thought possible. In the beginning, I wasn’t sure Riley would speak. Now she asks a million random questions a day (I’ve said we should start a website), and she’s so much better at conversations that sometimes other people don’t even realize she has autism. She used to rock back and forth and wander, completely unable to make connections with other people, and now she remembers everyone’s birthday and always seems to know exactly how to encourage everyone she meets. If only we talked about those things first, so I could feel a little steadier on my feet. I often want to do that for the disciples when I read scripture. I want to pause in the middle of a verse and call to them over the centuries, “Wait. Before you lean over and ask that ridiculous question, before you say, “It’s because we forgot to bring the bread (Matthew 16:7),” can I remind you who He is and what you’ve seen Him do? But I have the benefit of hindsight, and I still need a clear fix on the Master’s face before I step out of the boat, before I sit across the table from someone telling me what the numbers say about my children.
“Okay,” I say to Him, nearly every day of this life, from where I sit, with one hand gripping the boat, fixing my eyes on Him moving toward me. “I think I see you out there in the wind, walking right on top of everything that scares me and threatens to make us sink. If that’s you, tell me to come to you.”
I never feel big enough for this life we live together. I am never enough. I am exactly the reason scripture says things like,
Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord (1 Corinthians 1:26-31).
I am the one Paul speaks of when he says,
But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me (2 Corinthians 12:9)
I live in a boat on a wild sea in a relentless wind, knowing I’ve just seen Him feed more than five thousand people with two fish and five loaves of bread. Hasn’t He some how managed to use me—inadequate, ordinary me–to help my daughter and son get out of the boat so they can walk on water? I’ve seen miracles already. Enough for a lifetime. But still, sometimes I see the wind and the waves and I start to sink.
I’ve read this passage of scripture hundreds of times, swallowed it whole, but until Mom, the kids, and I discussed it on Sunday I’d never thought hard about the magnitude of Peter’s request that day. It was one thing for Jesus to walk on water, but Peter knew that if it was really Jesus, He had the power to make Peter walk on water—ordinary, inadequate Peter. Jesus could make five loaves and two fish enough for more than five thousand people, and He had enough power to make it so that a fisherman could walk on water too. He has enough power to use me, to make me enough for the challenges I face with my kids. Jesus once said,
Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you (Matthew 17:20).
I’ve sat in discussions where we make excuses about the bold, blow-our-minds language He used and say things like, “Well, He didn’t really mean that literally.” Maybe He did, maybe He didn’t, but on Sunday morning I realized once again that what I ask him to do with me is a measure of my faith. I sat there wondering if my life really shows that I believe He can make me walk on water or throw a mountain into the sea with a word. I thought, “Do I ask Him to do through me what I absolutely cannot do? Things I can’t imagine ever having the capacity to do? Things only He can do?”
And then I realized that every time I ask Him to put words on Adam’s tongue, to help me know how to teach my kids, to use me to bring Him any glory at all, I am asking Him to tell me to come to Him on the water. And despite the things I’ve seen Him do in their lives—nothing short of feeding five thousand with a handful of food—whether or not we walk on water comes down to one thing, something we fight for every day: eye contact.
My children, specifically the two with autism, have great difficulty making eye contact. Next to I love you, the three words most commonly spoken by the adults in our home are look.at.me. (The kids? Mom. And Can I. Definitely. But that’s a different post.:)) In fact, the first advice I give a new friend genuinely interested in connecting with my children is, “When you talk to them, make sure you have their eyes.” Whenever our son won’t respond to us, we hold his chin in our hands so that he has no choice but to make and keep eye contact.
I once ran across an interview with an adult woman with autism who said without apology that she still refused to make eye contact with other people. I love that some autistic adults are so articulate, because their thoughts shine a light where I have been straining to see through darkness. This very articulate woman said, “There’s too much emotional information in the eyes. I can’t take it and focus on the words and everything else around me too. It’s just too much.”
I’m not sure if that’s true for Adam and Riley or not, but I think it’s ironic that the reason some individuals with autism resist making eye contact is exactly the reason the rest of us need it. And too much information or not, eye contact is the key to making sure that my son can focus on what I’m saying to him.
For a few minutes after Peter stepped out of that boat, he walked on water. And I know exactly where his eyes were focused—straight ahead, locked on Christ, the one to whom he walked, the one enabling him to walk where other men sink. And then he saw the wind. He noticed the waves. He broke eye contact. And he began to sink.
There’s only one way I can walk on water.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart (Hebrews 12:1-3).
I can’t tell you how much it comforts me that when Peter begins to sink and cries out, Jesus catches him immediately, still standing solidly on top of the water. He never loses his footing, even when I lose mine. I hear that tinge of disappointment in the Savior’s voice, the one in mine when my children have almost managed something new and give up. “Oh, Peter. Why did you doubt?” But still, Jesus lifts the sinking man so that he can stand again. The scripture doesn’t say, but I imagine Christ’s hand remaining on Peter’s arm or around his shoulders, the strength in his grip unbelievable, as they walk together all the way back to the boat. I imagine it was a walk that Peter never forgot.
I suppose it’s my distraction with the details, the things that make me feel so overwhelmed, that are the reason I feel His arms so solidly carrying me too. And it’s amazing the things He does with not enough like me, and the way all the wind and waves seem to bow down and be still when He steps in the boat. All the never, can’t, don’t, and won’t in the world are not enough to stop us from walking on water if He says, “Come.” And that has to be the reason, especially here, I always feel His hand lifting my chin and hear His voice calling, “Look.at.me.”
