Water-Walking Lessons

I decided this afternoon that I must either learn how to walk on water properly, or else give it up entirely. Being a bad water-walker is nearly as bad for my health, I think, as being a bad (but addicted) down-hill skier. I have not found it to be expensive, but it’s very stressful.

That leaves me, of course, with only one option, because it doesn’t matter how positively terrified I was the last time out, the lure of obtaining God’s promise and possessing my inheritance is irresistible to me. I cannot tolerate living a ho-hum, normal life—not when God has better stuff available for me. Aside from that, while I’ve gotten a little beat up by my own fears in the meantime, it is undeniable that the Lord hasn’t so far let me down.

First it was leaving the family homestead to live in a rental house in which rent and utilities consumed about half of my small income. Whew. Survived that, my income increased a little, and then I graduated to doing things like buying red provincial-print pants (those of you who have been with me from the start may remember those) that I didn’t actually need, in spite of a very tight budget. From there it was massages that I needed but couldn’t really afford, and then the purchase of a house that would come with a barely-affordable mortgage. Some of those smaller things seem just that, now—small—but buying those pants when I was hard-pressed to pay the rent every month was a big deal then.

Just as what I’m facing now seems like a big deal, but later will seem like child’s play.

What I’m facing now is the completion of an addition, with no money. Okay, "no money" isn’t accurate. I have a few hundred dollars on which to live until my next round of billing my clients, but that isn’t even enough to pay for the bathtub that is presently sitting in a warehouse waiting for me to pick it up. Yep, you read right. I’m plumb broke. Not because I ran out of money (although I would have before long) but because the Lord had another idea for that money.

Here I am, in a jam.

The Lord has spoken some pretty big and exciting things to me in the past couple of days, and I’ve been living on passage after passage of miracles recorded in the Bible, but today may be the very first day ever that I felt the Lord actually telling me to go to the library and get a novel to read. The thing is, I’m just thinking about my situation too much. I’m looking at the waves around me too much. If I didn’t believe that He would come through, I wouldn’t have done what He asked with the rest of my building money, but …

Apparently part of walking on water is reading a novel. It means relaxing while He takes care of business.

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