Smiling At the Future

I love the walking on water story.  Seriously.  Love it.  Most people, when they start talking about it, like to focus in on the part about getting out of the boat.  If you want to walk on water, you’ve got to ‘step out in faith’, you’ve got to get out of the boat.  It’s true, Peter exhibited faith — and he took action.  But then something else happened.  He started to sink.  There he is, walking along on the top of the water in the middle of a storm, happy as you please.  And he began to sink.  Right?

Well, okay.  That’s not the whole story.  There’s that other thing.  There’s this part:

“But seeing the wind, he became afraid, and beginning to sink, he cried out, saying, “Lord, save me!” – Matt. 14: 30

He got distracted.  He got distracted and he became full of fear as he began to lean to his own understanding.  I imagine it went something like, “I’m walking on water.  And there’s a storm.  And lots of wind.  Wait!  This is crazy!  It doesn’t make any sense.  Things like this don’t happen!  There’s no way this can be true, no way this can be happening.  I’m gonna die!”

Okay.  Maybe he didn’t have time to think all those thoughts.  But you get the idea, right?

Nothing changed.  His circumstances didn’t change.  The boat was still there.  The storm was still raging.  Jesus was still there.  He was walking on water.

But his focus changed.

Peter & JFK Jr.

Remember when John F Kennedy Jr’s plane went down as his was flying to Martha’s Vineyard?  One thing that was mentioned over and over again at that time was that he had ‘lost his horizon’.

Certain cloud formations, poor weather conditions, and darkness can cause a pilot to lose the true horizon, especially over bodies of large water.  They can become severely disoriented.  Up feels down.  Down feels like it’s sideways.  Sideways feels like it’s ‘right-side-up’.  It’s called ‘a false horizon.’

If the pilot continues to rely solely on the way he feels, or even the way things appear to be,  he can easily end up flying upside down thinking it’s right side up and fly straight into trouble.

But there’s an instrument on planes.  It’s sole purpose is to indicate the true horizon.  If a pilot begins to feel that disorientation or even just recognizes that conditions are unfavorable, they can rely on that instrument to give them a true horizon, and therefore actually know with certainty which way is up.

Where’s Your Focus?

The same thing happens to us in life.   We have a dream.  We have a goal.  We commit to living our lives as a Christian.  We get out of the boat.  We step out in faith.  We take action.

And then we look around.  We get distracted.  We lose sight of the important things, of our core values.  We start focusing more on money, or hanging on to a particular relationship, or status, or getting to that perfect weight on the scale.

Or we get distracted by ‘issues’ that tick us off (that’s a big one for me), or looking around at what other people are doing and how they’re doing and how quickly or easily (we think) they got there.  We start to gauge what we expect to happen based on the conditions we see around us.  The wind, where we think the horizon is, where we think we are, what we think is going to happen, the things we think we know.

Time to Ask

All we have to do to get back on track — is ask.  After all, when Peter realized he was sinking, he cried out “Lord!  Save me!”  And verse 31 says,

“And immediately, Jesus stretched out His hand and took hold of him….”

Get your eyes focused back where they belong.  Look to your instrument panel (God) for the true horizon, no matter how you may feel at the moment.  And ask.  You’ll be walking on water again in no time.

Is it time to get refocused and ask for help?  What do you need to stop focusing on or worrying about?  Are your eyes on a true horizon?

Love,

deb

(photo credit: Deb Owen)

This entry was posted on Monday, April 12th, 2010 at 10:12 am and is filed under Faith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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