Last week I talked about my difficulty with “setting out” and I talked about a song “Oceans” that I loved. The song to me, is a reference to Peter walking on water. So, the other day, I was really excited when my 5yr old’s Bible lesson was about Peter walking on water. I was like, last Sunday we sang a song about walking on water, last Tuesday I wrote a blog post about walking on water (really it was on setting out, but same thing), and today we’re studying Peter walking on water. Pretty cool. Not sure where God’s taking me with this, but you have to step outside the boat sometime, right? (actually hanging my foot out and testing the water with my toe sounds better, but we’ll get to that in a minute)
So, I’m always telling people how similar my daughter’s personality is to my own. And, one of the things I love about teaching my child the Bible is seeing the story from her perspective. So, some things to know before I describe her opinion of Peter walking on water. My daughter asked Jesus in her heart shortly after she turned 5, so months ago. We often discuss what it means to have Jesus in your heart and how she relates to others and circumstances because of that. My husband and I have agreed that her faith is genuine and we will allow her to take communion next time she is present with us for that, and we have begun discussing baptism – she’s terrified of water on her head so we’re not pushing it because this needs to be something she does when she’s ready but we’ve started dialogue to help her understand why we do it, what it is, and what it means.
Anyways…all that to say, I have a lot to work with when we do our Bible lessons. So, I’m excited about Peter walking on water, it’s one of my favorite Bible stories. It’s a story about faith, and trust, and doing the impossible. I start by telling her about this big storm, and all the disciples including Peter are out on the lake on the boat and they’re scared. So they see Jesus walking on the water coming to the boat. At this point, she thinks that’s pretty cool that Jesus can walk on water. He’s Jesus, so he can do anything!
I continue on by telling her that Peter sees Jesus and says “I want to walk on water too!” and Jesus tells him to “come on out!”. At this point my child states that “that’s crazy” (you see where I’m going with this now). I kept on with the story and told her about how Peter walked out on the water, he was actually walking on the water because you see, Jesus can do anything but with Jesus in our hearts we can do anything too. She looks skeptical. So we continue on, Peter looked around at the storm clouds and the big waves and he got scared and when he got scared he started to sink so he cried out and asked Jesus to rescue him. Jesus came over and pulled him out of the water, placing him back on top of the water and they walk to the boat together.
I think I did a pretty good job telling the story and emphasizing that with God all things are possible. However, my 5 year old’s opinion was. “if I was Peter I would have stayed in the boat, I might have sat down and put my foot over the side and put my toe in the water” (thought she seemed doubtful that she would have even ventured this far, the boat was obviously much safer)
I was shocked, what child doesn’t think walking on water would be awesome? Apparently mine.
But then I realized, actually, I agree with her, putting my foot over the side and swishing it in the water while remaining in the safety of the boat sounds like a pretty good idea to me. If I don’t like the water I’ll just pull my foot back into the boat and we’ll be done with the water. When I tell people my child is a lot like me, I’m not kidding. We seem to have the same automatic opinion of “setting out” or “walking on water”. We just like the boat better.
But, you know, when Jesus calls you out on the water, it’s important to go.