Walking on the Water

This is a story about the middle. And Jesus and Peter and faith too—because those are the things I’ve found in the middle. But don’t worry, I’ll start at the beginning. That’s always the best place anyway.

In late September I was standing alone in my kitchen baking Half Baked Harvests Maple Brown Butter Cookies when suddenly, the arches in both my feet cramped. I hobbled a few steps and bent over to take my socks off and I saw the second toe on my right foot pulling strangely to the side. I wasn’t just cramping, I was spasming. In the weeks that followed, those spots remained sensitive. It felt as if they might cramp again and so I avoided walking long distances and put arch support in my shoes and wondered if I’d be one of those middle aged women walking around Disneyland in jeans and running shoes someday because Converse just couldn’t do it for me anymore.

If I’m going to be really honest, I’ll tell you my first thought when I cramped—my very first thought, was “this is neurological.” Because both feet at the same time? With no prior injury or fatigue to that muscle just standing in my kitchen? So I thought “this is neurological” but what happened was, I went to the podiatrist, which if you don’t know, is a foot doctor, not a head doctor. Because you see, I  really wanted it to be a problem with my feet, and I didn’t want to jump to any dramatic conclusions. But the foot doctor said my feet were fine.

From there I developed on and off muscle twitching in the arch of my feet where the muscle had cramped. From October to December those muscle twitches traveled up into my calves and then my quads and then finally all over my body. I developed episodes of heart pounding—a feeling like I had just done an epic amount of cardio when I had done none, and then by mid-December I started to feel jacked up, like I had caffeine in my veins, especially at night. My heart started skipping beats. My period started to come 4-7 days early each month and I started to have sleep starts, which if you don’t know, is a charming phenomena where you’re almost asleep and then BAM! Your body just jolts awake with a violent jump and a dose of adrenaline. I also started experiencing small involuntary muscle movements. Then one night as I was falling asleep my shoulder jerked underneath me. I got up to go to the bathroom a few seconds later, I felt cold and shivered. Then my teeth started to chatter and within a minute or two my jaw locked up and my whole body started to shake. I woke Jeremy up and told him we had to go to the ER. When I got in the car the chorus to the song by John Reddick was playing “He is up to something, he is up to something, God is doing something, right now.” I believed it.

By the time I got to the hospital the episode had died down. But then it all happened again a few weeks later. My doctors first theory was I was on too much thyroid hormone. I have Hashimoto thyroiditis which is an autoimmune disease. Autoimmunity means my immune system is confused and so it attacks my own body. We have different labels for whatever it’s currently destroying—Hashimoto or Graves if, like in my case, it’s destroying the thyroid. Rheumatoid Arthritis if it’s destroying your joints and so on. This is why it is said that people tend to “collect” autoimmune diseases because as soon as your immune system is done attacking one thing it can move on an attack another. Autoimmunity is essentially your body trying to kill you—very slowly.

It’s a thief, essentially. It comes to kill, steal and destroy. I think of autoimmunity as the enemy himself sometimes.

 “For our fight is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against rulers of the darkness of this world and against spiritual forces in the heavenly realms.” Ephesians 6:12

Two and a half years ago I wrote an essay called “Loaves and Fishes.” In it, I talked about how I’d recently felt led to pray for healing from Hashimoto and autoimmunity. I had been wondering about the nature of healing. How Jesus did it in the Bible and how he does it today. It’s not so much that I thought this was a reasonable thing to ask—healing from autoimmunity doesn’t just happen. If anything, “remission” is much more likely, and it’s generally accepted that healing is not a probable or reasonable goal. So I don’t know why I began to think I should pray for healing, only that I did, and also because God can do anything and I figured if God was telling me to pray about it, there was something for me there, whether it resulted in what I hoped for or not.

I wrote “Loaves and Fishes” after a day of tumult in all of this “healing” business where I prayed hard and listened to a song called “Oceans” by Hillsong United on repeat in my car. That day I was starting to realize that healing, for me, was more about knowing the Healer. I didn't just want the kind of faith it takes to believe in miracles, I wanted the kind of faith that says “not my will but yours be done.” And so as Oceans played again and then again, I closed my eyes and prayed the lyrics earnestly:

Spirit lead me where my trust is without boarders

Let me walk upon the waters

Wherever you would call me

Take me deeper than my feet could ever wander

And my faith will be made stronger

In the presence of my savior 

When my husband found out I prayed this he jokingly said “well that’s scary” which unfortunately, I hadn’t considered prior.

So getting caught up here, what happened was, I started to pray for healing, then went full-in on the Healer, and then one day, my symptoms appeared to suddenly get worse.

I came down in thyroid medication and that seems to help resolve some things: the heart issues and involuntary muscle movements stopped, as did the fight or flight responses. But the muscle jumping continued. It had lightened up in intensity, but it was still constant, and all over my body. I know muscle fasciculations don’t sound, to other people, as sinister as it feels to the one experiencing it—but know when your body moves without you telling it to, it doesn’t just feel like jumpy muscles—it feels like something is very, very wrong. And something is. I’m now back to low thyroid. My body needs more medication as evidenced by my most recent blood work and all the hair I loose each day. This muscle stuff, it seems, doesn't not stem from a thyroid medication problem.

Last week I sat across from my doctor as we casually decided the next step was a brain MRI—you know to rule out or confirm things like MS and brain tumors. You know, just those things. There are other things it could be, of course, things I’d need a neurologist for perhaps. Or maybe it’s just some other small thing that can be remedied—who knows? I did confirm I have high cortisol after all. So all this to say there is hope it’s not something horrible and deadly mixed with the fear that it is.

So that’s all of it then. I sit here today, in this middle place, with an MRI and the unknown ahead of me. Most days, and only by Gods grace, I have peace. Other days can be hard. Two days ago I had a hard day. I spent the whole morning and afternoon trying to pour out all my sorrow and weakness and fear and get as close as I could to Jesus. In that place I asked if he could give me something to hold onto to help in the days ahead leading up to the MRI.

Then I got into my car to go grocery shopping because grocery shopping never ends and this is real life. On the way I put on a Podcast called Pearls with Kristy McLelland. I listened to an episode titled “The Only Disciple To Get It Right.”

That disciple? Peter.

Kristy explained that right after the miracle of the Loaves and Fishes (yeah—get that), Jesus instructs his disciples to go on ahead of him while he dismisses the crowd and so he could pray. The disciples sail away from the shore and well into the night before they see Jesus walking toward their boat on the water. The Bible says at this sight the disciples “were terrified.” They thought he might be a ghost but Jesus called to them and said “Have courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.”

“In the Bible, it’s interesting” Kristy says “this ‘take courage’ seems to be an invitation. He seems to be inviting all of them into a moment. But Peter alone speaks up. ‘Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.’”

He basically says “Lord if it’s really you, then you tell me to come out on the water too.”

Kristy says she’s not much of a risk taker but the risks she has taken in life have needed the living God to call her out and into them. She’s needed to know, that she knows, that she knows, that He said. “Because I’ll play it safe every time” she says. “But I’m learning as a citizen of the Kingdom that God has adventures for me, but I need to know that he said it, I need to know He’s the one calling me—this is Peter (doing that) and I love this next line…”

“Come.” Jesus said.

We all know what happens next. Climbing out of the boat, Peter starts walking on the water toward Jesus. But when he sees the strength of the wind he becomes afraid and beginning to sink he cries out “Lord, save me!” 

“Immediately, Jesus reached out his hand, caught hold of him, and said to him, ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’”

Kristy teaches the Bible through a middle eastern lens. She went on to explain that in the west we often talk about this moment as “Peters failure.” But Kristy says “I would like to reframe this story because Peter is the only one of the twelve that got out of the boat. He is the only one in that Jewish world that physically moved toward his Rabbi at great risk, even walking on the chaos. I am not convinced at all that this is a story about Peters failure. I think it’s something else entirely. Eleven men saw that happen. Only one lived it. Eleven watched it. One embodied it. Eleven knew what it looked like. One knew what it felt like. I want you to envision Peter from that moment forward. He is a man walking around in his Jewish world who physically knows what it’s like to walk on water. He’s not a spectator in the moment, he is an active participant with his Rabbi in the lesson. He’s the only one that lives forward with his very body knowing it.”

Just then she poses a question and I answer it silently: “do you want to be a spectator of the faith or do you want to be an active participant of the faith?”

She asks us to contemplate what it might have done to Peter to carry that memory of walking with Jesus on the water with him. Not as a spectator but as a participant—how that would have informed his faith—how that would have equipped Peter for the work that he would do later in his life in the book of Acts. Because later Peter will encounter a lame man begging at the temple gate called Beautiful, and when the man asks for money, Peter will step into that moment and say “I don’t have silver or gold, but what I do have, I give you: In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, get up and walk!” And the man will walk. Kristy says “The kind of man who says something like that—is the kind of man that knows what it feels like to walk on the water.” 

I break out in goosebumps because I think I am being called out onto the water too. I think this is the image Jesus is giving me for these next days. I sense Jesus, in this middle moment, feels what it’s like to live in my body that has something very wrong with it and is calling to me saying “Have courage. It is I. Don’t be afraid.” And I don’t know what it means and I don’t know if I will sink or walk confident, but what I do know is that if I step out of the boat in faith and walk toward Him, that memory will inform my faith for the rest of my life.

It is written in Acts chapter 5 that Peter had so much of the Holy Spirit in him that people would line up the sick in the street, not even hoping they would touch him, but that his shadow might fall on some of them. Peters shadow was so powerful it healed people. 

“When we start to string these (stories) together” Kristy says in summary “I believe that moment with Jesus walking on the water was the exact opposite of Peters failure…He alone lived with that memory well into the new testimate era…there are some Kingdom adventures we are not going to know until we get out of the boat. Can you understand that feeling of being in the boat and wanting with all of your heart to be close to your Rabbi, but it’s going to come at great risk…it’s going to cost you something?”

Yes. In fact I do know, I think.

Jesus walked on the water and he told Peter to ‘Come.’

Are you calling me to “come” Lord? I ask. If you are, I need to know that I know that I know that You said.

It’s then I remember my essay about the Loaves and Fishes and autoimmunity and Hillsong’s Oceans. 

Oceans. Water. Walking on water? What exactly did I write in that essay, I wonder?

I pull into the driveway at home and pull up my old essay and read it.

“Spirit lead me where my trust is without boarders

Let me *walk upon the waters*

Wherever you would call me”

I had prayed this. 

And then I wrote, “When I pray Spirit lead me where my trust is without boarders, let me walk upon the waters wherever you would call me, He says “COME TO ME.”

And there it is.

So it appears Jesus is in process of answering my “scary” prayer and here we are. In the middle of it.

In January, when things felt bleakest and because God is the coolest, two things happened. First, my friend Crystal sent me a voice recording. “I couldn’t get this song out of my head” she text “and I never record (songs) and send them to people but I felt like you needed to hear it.”

The song was called “Dancing on the Waves” by We The Kingdom

“Don’t be afraid

 I am your strength

 We’ll be walking on the water dancing on the waves.”

Also in January, when things felt bleakest, God gave me a verse. I woke up one morning to the “Verse of the Day” notification on my phone and if you have the Bible app, you know you get a verse of the day notification every day at 6am. Everybody with the app gets the same verse. Except this particular day I didn’t get the same verse as everyone else in the world. For some reason, I got a different verse. I got this verse:

“And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will Himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast.”

1 Peter 5:10

It’s Peter, you guys. Not only does the verse say what it does, but Peter said it. I can’t even.

But something you must know is that I adore telling myself stories (Kristy McLelland isn’t the only one who “strings the story pearls together”) and a quick “God meant this verse just for me!” was a tempting place to file this little event away. And I might have, except apparently I’m into asking God to confirm things and so I said “God if you mean this verse for me, would you allow me to come across this verse again?” But I doubted I would. It’s not a common verse. In fact, I don’t know that I’d ever seen it before. If I happened to see it again, I’d know that I’d know that I’d know that He said. Ten days later I opened my devotional and read it again in black and white, right there in Streams in the Desert by LB Cowman on January 27th. And then a few weeks later, just for good measure, it popped up on my phone again as the real verse of the day—the one everyone got, including me, again. 

When Jesus calls us out onto the water, we are not alone. He is right there and he has said “Have courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.”

I hear your invitation, Lord.

Peter, hold my purse.