I got out of the boat
Read this on the morning you'd rather stay in the boat.
Dear friend,
Every August, it comes back.
The pencils are sharpened and the books are stacked and the plan is written in my best handwriting, and somewhere around the second week of the month I wake up afraid. Not of anything I can point to. Just the old fear — that I am not enough for this, that I have talked myself into something too big, that this is the year it all comes apart. I have homeschooled for eighteen years. I am a grandmother. It still comes.
So I want to tell you where I go when it does.
In August of 1993 I was a teenager standing in a field in Denver with more people than I had ever seen in my life, waiting for the Holy Father. When he finally spoke, one line went through the crowd and straight into my soul, and it has never left: Trust in God, because He trusts in you. I did not know then what he was preparing me for. I only knew that an old man in white had looked at a field full of frightened young people and told us that God was not waiting for us to be brave. He already trusted us. The trusting back was ours to do.
Fifteen years later I stood at the edge of my own kitchen with a plan I did not trust and a husband who was not entirely convinced, and I heard it again.
Here is the passage I go back to. Read it slowly.
And immediately Jesus spoke to them, saying: Be of good heart: it is I, fear ye not. And Peter making answer, said: Lord, if it be thou, bid me come to thee upon the waters. And he said: Come. And Peter going down out of the boat, walked upon the water to come to Jesus. But seeing the wind strong, he was afraid: and when he began to sink, he cried out, saying: Lord, save me. And immediately Jesus stretching forth his hand took hold of him.Matthew 14:27–31
We are all Peter. Every one of us. We ask to be called, we are called, we climb out of the boat — and then we look at the wind. The wind is the math curriculum that isn't working, the toddler who has stopped napping, the relative who asks how socialization is going, the quiet voice at eleven o'clock at night that says a real teacher would do this better. And we begin to sink.
Dear friend, hear this: Peter sinking is not the failure in that story. Peter not getting out of the boat would have been the failure. The sinking is what happens to people who obey. And the very next word after his cry is immediately. He does not let us go under. He has pulled me back up every August for eighteen years, and He has not once been late.
I used to think being called meant I would stop being afraid. It doesn't. It means I get out of the boat afraid, and I find out again that He is already standing on the water — and that He trusted me to come.
One thing to do at your table this weekBefore the first lesson, before the coffee is even finished, say out loud — to Him, in your own words — the thing you are actually afraid of this year. Name it plainly. Then say: Lord, bid me come. That's it. Then get out of the boat.
Lord, I am out of the boat and I can see the wind. Take hold of me. Let my children see a mother who was afraid and had the courage to trust anyway. Jesus, I trust in You.
