This past week has given me a bit of an insight into how the disciples were feeling in today's Gospel.  My boss has kept me going nineteen to the dozen, I seem to be doing all the little jobs as well, I've got an Inspector in Leeds having a temper tantrum because I won't authorise expenditure for a conference - too many years in the finance section tell me it's not value for money - and then there's the heat.  Never mind the sauna on wheels, more generally known as the Central Line, the air conditioning in my part of the office has broken, resulting in the temperatures most afternoons hitting 30º Celsius and they are in no hurry to fix it as we are not deemed to essential equipment.  All in all it saps it out of you and you end the week at a low ebb. 

From reading the gospel story it's not hard to conclude that the disciples were not at their best at the time when Jesus met them in today's reading.  At the time the news of John the Baptist's death had been followed by Jesus setting out with them for a quiet time of prayer.  But this had been abandoned when the crowds followed them.  The the disciples had acted as catering staff, serving five thousand men and their families with food.  Jesus had sent the crowds away after the mean and had eventually retired to the mountains for solitary peace and prayer.  The disciples then had gone fishing and as night had fallen they had been caught in a storm.  It had been a long day and it had come at them from all angles, they were all in, at a low ebb - physically, mentally and spiritually.  Then out of the darkness they see someone defying gravity and walking on the water, a truly amazing sight.  Matthew in his account of this scene says that they were far from land, so the water would have been deep and as stalwart fisherman, as some of them were, and in their home waters, they succumbed, succumbed not just to mere fear but to stark terror not believing what they saw.

"Take heart", Jesus said, "and don't be afraid" and Peter following Jesus' encouragement to go to him, starts out well enough, with faith that if Jesus thought he could walk on water, then he really could.  And so he did, that is until he took his eyes off Jesus and thought about the storm.

And how like Peter are we, often our attention spans are equally as short when praying or listening out for God.  It's often a case of: "Yes, Lord, I believe you'll help me through this ... but ooh! what a mess I'm in!"  It just doesn't take much to allow that first thought in, and bang! our attention is right back to our problem and off God.  You can hear God saying: "You of little faith ... Bob, Geoffrey ..." ... And we sit there wondering why God has left us to work out a problem that's more his size than ours.

The thing is that he hasn't left us, it's that we're looking for him in the wrong place.  God is not in the problem - Jesus wasn't in the storm tossed boat - He was in the last place anyone would have expected - walking on the deep water.  We have to look up to the deep water around us to see God.

In our upbringing, from birth, we are taught to relate to others - our parents, friends - gradually the circle widens.  Then come the first words, and slowly our minds take in more and more knowledge.   But the knowledge of operating with freedom from fear comes way, way down the list of priorities.  That is, if it figures at all.  Yet God appears to expect us to live without fear.  We have Jesus repeating with monotonous regularity this particular concept, so God obviously means it to be the way to live.

Not that that makes much difference to the disciples before the events of the resurrection.  They spent their time like just so many of us today, worrying their way from one situation to the next.  And what good does it do us?

Yet after the resurrection of Jesus, these same disciples that worried themselves silly and were in so much fear on the boat, have changed.  They are new people operating without fear.  Why can't we be like them?  Why can't we be post-resurrection people, too?!  Jesus is Lord!  He is alive! So just what do we have to fear?

It is worth remembering that faith diminishes when fear takes over, as Peter found out when he took his eyes off Jesus.  So the more we agonise, the quicker our reserves of faith are going to be depleted.  We have to ask ourselves whether we leave ourselves enough time to get our reserves of faith back to what is the operational norm.

The bottom line is like this - doesn't fear sound too dangerous a game with which to tangle. Peter's fears had so depleted his faith that on the night of Jesus' arrest there was only a flicker left when he attacked the servant Malchus in Gethsemane.  And after that it was all downhill until the denials in the High Priest's House.  It took a resurrection to restore his faith ... but the resurrection proved to be permanent.