We read in Matthew's Gospel (14:26) that Jesus walked on water. It frightened the daylight out of the Apostles and would probably do the same to us. No one, not even the world's greatest magicians and illusionists, has been able to duplicate that. To be able to walk on water one has to be divine.
That’s what we who believe believe. We believe that Jesus' walking on water is proof positive that he is who he said he is and whom we believe him to be: the Son of God. Now for those who don't believe or don't wish to believe, Jesus' walking on water is written off as so much hokum: the product of the fertile imaginations of those who desperately wanted to believe Jesus was someone he was not.
But both are wrong. Belief does not come from the miraculous, from the extraordinary. Belief in another comes from the mundane, the ordinary. The Apostles came to believe Jesus and to believe in him, not because of his miracles, not because he walked on water or raised Lazarus from the grave or fed 5000 plus people with five loaves of bread and two small fish. No, Peter and Andrew and all the rest found the basis of their faith in Jesus because he always loved and cared about them.
It is the little things we do for the ones we love that matter. The big things are icing on the cake. We may be impressed by expensive gifts. Walking on water, making a blind man see, giving clean skin to a leper can almost, if not, overwhelm the receiver and the beholder. They almost demand belief, the big things do.
But we don't fall in love with the gift giver because we are impressed by his/her magniloquence. We fall in love with the gift giver because of all the little, everyday gifts of love. Not the big but the little. Not the extraordinary but the ordinary. Not the out-of-this-world, the you'd-have-to-see-this-to-believe- it; but the mundane.
For you and me, our faith in God comes not because he cures an incurable disease— for us or for a loved one. Our faith comes because God helps us get through each day when we are in pain, when we are ready to give up, to despair.
Faith in another, love of another, comes and grows. It flourishes little by little, day by day. We sprinkle another, God sprinkles us, every day. The water to grow comes drop by drop and not by bucketfulls. Trying to overwhelm the other usually results in drowning.
In any relationship—God with us, us with God, one with another—it is never the size or the cost of the gift that matters, really. It never is. What matters in the beginning, in the end, and all along is the love behind the gift. If love is not there or if the love is selfish rather than of the other, the gift, no matter how impressive or miraculous, will mean very little.
We need not walk on water to show our love for God, for another. All we need do is wade through it with them.
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