Day 6. Walk on Water

“Walk on Water”, 4×4 oil on canvas, framed

Last 31 in 31, I made a small painting and wrote a poem titled Audacity that began with this line: “What if instead of eggshells, I walked on water?”

It’s been a full year, and I’m here to report that although I hoped it might be prophetic, it turns out it was mostly aspirational. I still find myself constantly picking little white shells from my heels.

I still love the image, though. It immediately brings to mind the story of Peter, who also walked on water—at least for a time. As a child, I heard this story mostly as a cautionary tale about uncertainty: how, when he noticed the wind, he became afraid and began to sink. Don’t do that, was the lesson I absorbed.

But I’ve come to see uncertainty differently. It doesn’t feel like the opposite of faith so much as the other side of the same coin. I wonder if faith, at its core, is simply a willingness to encounter doubt—to engage it honestly, and to ask for help when things become unbearable.

Sometimes I wonder if my eggshell-walking is really just a crisis of faith: the belief that I can’t withstand the uncertainty of other people’s reactions, so I try to manage them through careful, calculated self-control.

I always imagine Peter climbing back into the boat of his “fishing bros” after nearly drowning, after having to cry out to be saved. Did they mock him? Take turns doing impressions of the moment he started to flail? Call his scream “girly?”

And did he—this is my hope—look at them and say something like: “Cool, cool. Sure, I’m drenched and shivering. But you know what else I am? A person who walked—walked!—on water.”