Withdraw to Pray

We’ve been spending a lot of time at Atwood Lake.

Kate and I grew up on that lake. She was at a cottage. I was ,at the campground on the other side of the lake. My family had an RV and we camped a few times growing up. We were always at the Atwood Fall Festival each October.

Kate’s grandparents bought a little three bedroom cottage in the 1960s. They added on a big living room and porch in the 1980s. Each year, we stuff Kate’s family, 15 people with 3 dogs, into that cottage. And it’s an amazing time.

That lake features large in both of our lives. It served different roles however. My family admired it, and swam in it. But we didn’t really go on it. Kate’s family swam, sailed, water-skied and tubed.

I first visited the cottage when I was 17 with my sister, Val. We loved seeing the lake again and getting the sense of this family and their story. We ate, swam, told stories. Then Bob, Constance, and Kate decided to take us out on the sailboat. Val and I said, yes! We’d never been sailing.

It was a blustery August day. The water was choppy. My in-laws were excited, it would be fast sailing. They wouldn’t be “in irons.” Whatever that means.

Val and I hopped in, and… have I mentioned… we’ve never been sailing? The boat moved fast. Bob and Constance were having a blast. Kate looked as beautiful and confident as always. My sister and I were in abject terror. Our eyes wide. Tense.

Is the boat supposed to tilt? Pontoons don’t do that. I was terrified, and I haven’t been sailing since.

Being scared in a boat is biblical, you should know. If you’ve ever found yourself scared, you’re in good company. The disciples were frightened in their boat, which was being buffeted by the wind. Buffeted, I assume refers to Jimmy Buffet: You need a lot of margaritas on the beach to recover from the experience.

These are seasoned sailors out on the Sea of Galilee. The wind was against them. They were struggling. And at dawn they see Jesus walking on the lake. They were terrified. “It’s a ghost!” they cried in fear.

But Jesus says what God always says to us frightened mortals, “Don’t be afraid.”

We make a lot of this scene. How did Jesus walk on water? Well, he was just different than us. Last week’s sermon still rings in my ears, where I coined the phrase “practical miracle.” I also remember the Rev. Pam Branscome saying, “When approaching the Bible, don’t ask ‘did this happen?’ but ‘does this still happen?’” Well, I can get my arms around that.

Did Jesus walk on water? Sure. That’s what this story says. How? No idea. That’s a discussion. A better discussion is, do people still walk on water? Sure. How? Let me tell you.

We make a big deal about the walking on water part, and we don’t tend to notice the part just before it. Jesus withdraws to pray. He does that a lot in the gospels. He goes up on a mountainside by himself to pray. I want to focus our attention on that part.

It is no secret that I’m amazed by my wife. In other visits to the cottage, Kate showed off her skills water skiing. She’s amazing. Atwood is only a 25 horsepower lake, so the fact she can get out of the water and ski is pretty cool. I tried once, and I was just dragged through the water. If the human body is 70% water, I was made mostly of Atwood lake that day. How did Kate do it? Well, she grew up at the cottage. While I was selling honey and telling people about the secret life of bees, Kate was skiing and sailing.

She put in the time. That’s why she can get on the water. And we’re teaching the kids. Sam and Eve are becoming quite the skiers. This past week, Eve found some new confidence on the water as she’s been working on her form. Sam is working on skiing out of the wake. It’s exciting for this proud papa to watch his kids walk on water. They are putting in the time.

I once heard a parable of an engineer in one of my leadership books. She was hired to go into a factory that was having trouble with one of their machines. The engineer flies to the factory, walks in, and immediately sees the problem and points it out. It takes about 15 minutes total. The fix works, and the factory is back in business.

Two weeks later, the engineer gets an angry call from the company. “We just got your bill for $2,000 for 15 minutes of work. You have to be joking. We’re not paying you that rate.”

“Well,” She calmly replies. “You’re not paying for 15 minutes of work. You’re paying for my 4 years in college, 2 years getting my masters, all the on the job and off the job training and experience, that allowed me to walk into a factory that was shut down for a week and see the problem that you all missed.”

The factory paid and put a 20% tip on it.

The preparations, the time spent praying and preparing on the mountainside, is often overlooked. Often, we only value what we see. We don’t see the preparation. And if we do, often in movies it’s done in a montage. Very quickly to show the prep work, but it doesn’t show us, what the Rev. Eugene Petersen calls, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.[1]

What we only see as someone walking on water, or water skiing, or spending 15 minutes to solve a problem, took years of preparation.

Its why I’m loving the ESPN documentary series “The Last Dance” about the Michael Jordan era Chicago Bulls. It shows all the prep and struggle and long obedience in the same direction it took for them to win all those championships.

What looks, and is in many ways, like walking on water to we who are fearful in the boat, is actually years and years of preparation.

There have been so many sermons that have moved me. How did they do that? Where did they get the words? They withdrew to pray. They put in the work. They listened to God. Spent time working on their craft. Then they can walk on water.

All our heroes of faith. Martin Luther King, Jr, and Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker Movement and Mother Theresa, and Bishop Tutu, and Harry Emerson Fosdick… our grandparents, parents, mentors, all our heroes of faith have one thing in common. They withdrew to pray before they walked on water.

They spoke with God. Got a sense of the bigger picture and the path God had in place before they started down a path. Prayer and action, prayer and social justice, prayer and peace, prayer and hope, prayer and living are not two separate things, but go together, threads in the same fabric

Maybe you’re in the boat right now. You’re facing a storm. You feel like you’re in irons, which I’ve since learned means you’re “trapped” because you’re headed right into the wind, and the boat has stalled and is unable to maneuver. Or the boat’s tilting the wrong way, and you’re wide-eyed with terror. Look for those who will come to you across the waters. Do not be afraid. These things they can do, you can do and greater than these. Look for Jesus. Look for those disciples he will send to you, who will do the impossible right in front of your face.

Withdraw to pray. And a good prayer, Julian of Norwich reminds us…

All shall be well. And all shall be well.
And all manner of things shall be well.
For there is a force of love moving through the universe that holds us fast and will never let us go.

Even through the storm. Even when we’re stuck. Love will come to us across the waters, saying, “Do not be afraid.” Thanks be to God. Amen.

Works Cited

[1][1] He’s quoting Nietzche, The Pastor, a memoir. Page 246.

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