walking on water

Today was my last Sunday to venture out to "parish churches" and once again a thoughtful sermon challenged (and stayed with) me. Taking the Gospel of Peter's disastrous walk/stumble/sink on water, the preacher gave a variation on the theme of imitation vs skill. She spoke of her own experience with floating vs sinking at summer camp… how she had tried hard to imitate her friend the floater, with about the same results as Peter's.

Likewise, Peter, trying to imitate Christ, was a sinker not a walker. Then she went on to examine the differences between imitation and the real thing where faith is concerned; how you can't watch someone else's faith and automatically be able to see those same results in yourself.

Somewhere towards the end I got sidetracked. I was trying to imagine a universe where imitation would work… what that would be like. Decided it would take too much brain power to imagine, so went back to listening to the sermon. So much of life requires our actually experiencing a thing to get it. Yet we do watch. We do imitate. I was once told that "fake it til you make it" was a valid way to approach something out of my comfort zone. And sometimes it worked. But it worked not so much because of the faking aspect as the believing aspect that I could and would expand that zone. It all comes back to the importance of belief. Jesus was constantly chiding his friends "why didn't you believe? Where was your faith?" and constantly reminding others that their faith was the very key to their healing. Good information. Why can't we get it?