Don't Waste the Waiting part 4

There’s another story in Peter’s life that I love. It is the story where Peter walks on water. At this time, Peter had been following Jesus for a while. Jesus went to preach to a group of people, when He was done, He called His disciples to come with Him on the boat across the lake. Jesus went off to pray. At this point, Peter knew what he was waiting for, Jesus to come back to them, but if you know the story, you know that it didn’t happen in the way that he expected it to.

Matthew 14:25-31, “Shortly before dawn, Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. ‘It’s a ghost,’ they said, and cried out in fear. But Jesus immediately said to them: ’Take courage! It is I. don’t be afraid.’ ‘Lord if it’s you,’ Peter replied, ‘tell me to come to you on the water.’ ‘Come,” he said. Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’ Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. ‘You of little faith,’ he said, ‘why did you doubt?’”

We’ve all heard the phrase, “20/20 vision”. We especially heard it a lot going into the year 2020. When we were coming out of 2019, everyone was saying, “this is going to be the year of vision!”, “I’m going to see God perfectly in my life.”, “I’m going to see God’s plan perfectly in my life.”, “Everything is just going to work out, perfectly.” The key word to these is the word, perfectly. Going into 2020, we thought that everything was just going to be perfect, but when things started to happen that were outside of our plan and what we wanted to happen, we immediately started doubting. The thing about all of these sayings is that we are putting our faith into what happens in this world, when we put our faith in the world instead of in God, we will be let down every single time. 

I think a lot of us would say that 2020 was a hard year. Looking back on it, it is so easy to point out all of the things that maybe didn’t go the way that we had hoped, and we end up overlooking all of the good. There’s something cool about 20/20 vision, and that is that it is not perfect vision. It just means that you can see like the average human being can. I think that this is really cool, because when I first heard of the term, I immediately thought that it meant you had perfect vision. I went into 2020, thinking that having 20/20 vision was perfect, thinking that everything was going to work out perfectly (the way that I had planned in my mind). I’m not sure how vision works at all, but I do know that when we went into 2020 expecting to see everything perfectly, and things were a little blurry or hard to see, it made it so easy to doubt God was even there at all, because it was supposed to be perfectly clear. 

I love this story of Peter because he had the vision, he said, “God if it is you, command me to walk out on these waters.” I love that he said that because I never would have. I would have said something like, “God, if it is you, please just let me know that it is you.” I wouldn’t have asked Him to command me to walk out onto the water, that never would have come to my mind. Peter had the vision, but when he stepped out, he still sank. So, what was the problem? He didn’t have a vision problem, he had faith in the vision problem. If we’re being honest, I think this is something that we all have. We can see what God is doing or speaking in our lives, but it becomes really hard to have faith in His plan when we don’t understand. 

As you go through this week, think about how you can have faith in God’s plan. It’s not always going to be easy, because it’s not always going to happen the way that we had hoped. Our lives would change so much if we stopped praying for vision, like we saw in Peter’s story, vision doesn’t always mean we have everything we need. What if we started praying for faith in God’s plan?