The Note Went Soft At The Folds

He has run the same stretch of highway for nineteen years, and he knows where every decent cup of coffee on it is, and which of the two places on the west side will still be open at four in the morning.

In his wallet, tucked in behind the fuel card, there is a receipt folded into quarters.

He wrote on the back of it one October, at a truck stop outside Amarillo, because a thing had been sitting on him for about a week and he finally wrote the plain sentence of it down so that he would quit losing it in the noise.

That was two Octobers ago.

He reads it at the pumps. Not every time. Often enough that the paper has gone soft at the folds, furry along the creases the way paper goes, and the ink has faded on the first word, so that he reads it now from memory more than off the page.

It is not a complicated sentence. There is one verb in it. A man could do what it says in about four minutes.

And he has done a great deal about it. He has thought about it across most of Arkansas. He has prayed about it in three states, honestly, with the radio off. He has decided on two separate occasions that January would be the month, and once that it would be right after the trailer got its brakes done.

He has told God, out loud, in a cab with the heater rattling, that he is not saying no.

And he means that. He is not saying no.

He is a good man who has been getting ready for two years to do a four minute thing, and the getting ready has become its own long road, with fuel stops on it, and coffee, and a whole life.

It is not that he is a coward. Nobody who has taken a rig down a Wyoming grade in an ice storm at two in the morning is a coward.

It is that nobody ever told him the water would hold.

And you have a note somewhere. Maybe not paper. But you know exactly what it says, and you have known for a while now.

The word that called him out is the thing that held him up

Let us go and stand at the side of a boat in the dark, because everything on this page is standing on what happened there.

It is the fourth watch of the night, which is the worst one, the stretch between three and six when a person is at their thinnest. The wind is against them. It has been against them all night. And a figure comes walking, and they take Him for a ghost, and He tells them plainly not to be afraid.

Then Peter says the thing that got him written into the story.

And Peter answered him, "Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water." He said, "Come." So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus.Matthew 14:28-29

Read what he asked for. He did not ask whether the water was firm. He did not ask for a demonstration, or a sign in the sky, or a fleece on the deck, or a second confirmation from a man in the stern.

He asked for a word. And he got one, and it was one word long, and he put his whole body on it.

You are not waiting on a word. You have one, and it has been folded up in your pocket for two Octobers. That is not my opinion about your situation. It is written that His word does not return to Him empty but accomplishes what He sent it to do (Isaiah 55:11), and the Holy Spirit is the One who keeps a sentence like that live in a man for two years instead of letting it go quiet. Words go quiet. That one has not. There is a reason for that, and the reason is a Person.

Now here is the thing about that water, and it is the whole of it.

The water did not become solid because Peter believed hard enough on the way over the gunwale. There is nothing in the account about Peter's technique, his preparation, his readiness, or the state of his nerve. What the account gives us is a word from Christ, and a man standing on it.

You have been building your readiness for the wrong reason, and the reason you have never felt ready is that readiness was never the thing holding anybody up. Scripture calls faith the assurance of things hoped for (Hebrews 11:1), which is a hand open toward a Person, not a grip you tighten. And it is His Spirit, rather than a feeling in your chest, who makes a spoken word into a floor.

That is why we treat your two years gently here, and we are going to keep treating them gently.

You are not being scolded on this page. A man who reads a sentence at every fuel stop for two years is not a man who does not care. He is a man who cares enormously, and who has been quietly waiting to feel something he was never going to feel, because the thing he was waiting for was never on offer.

You are not a coward, and you were never told the water would hold, and that is what is being handed to you right now. It is written that God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind (2 Timothy 1:7), and the Spirit named in that verse is the same Spirit standing in the cab, in the kitchen, at the pump.

One more thing about the size of it, because this is where a person talks themselves out of the whole business.

Peter took one step. Not a crossing. One step over the side, and then another. Nothing in the account suggests he had a plan for the far shore.

You have permission for something small, and the smallness of it takes nothing away from it, because the size of a step was never what made it obedience. Scripture calls it being faithful in a very little thing (Luke 16:10), and it is the Holy Spirit who counts a four minute thing done today as the real article, while a man's own accounting keeps insisting it has to be bigger before it is worth anything.