Lord, save me.— Matthew 14:30
I was terrified of water as a child. Not cautious — terrified. A near-drowning experience had made sure of that. So when I finally signed up for swim lessons, the goal wasn’t fitness. It was facing something I had carried for a long time.
The instructor told me something on the first day that I didn’t expect.
“Relax. Relax. You will float.”
Here is what happens when a human body enters water: the water pushes back. That’s buoyancy: the natural upward force that counteracts weight. And the air in the lungs acts like balloons, keeping the body near the surface. Floating, it turns out, is not a skill. It’s a given. The body was designed for it.
The problem is fear.
When fear sets in, breathing becomes shallow. Less air in the lungs means less lift. The body tenses, the muscles fight the water, and what was designed to hold you up suddenly feels like it’s pulling you under. The harder you try to stay afloat, the faster you sink.
The message was simple: stop fighting what was designed to hold you.
I have thought about that moment more than once since then.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. — Proverbs 3:5
The Hebrew word for trust here is batach (בָּטַח): a word that carries the sense of throwing oneself down, of resting full weight on something. It is not passive confidence from a distance. It is the weight of a body fully surrendered to what is holding it.
Leaning not on your own understanding is not a call to stop thinking. It is a call to stop gripping. To stop the frantic effort to stay afloat through sheer force of will, when what was designed to hold us is already there, already pushing back, already sufficient.
Peter knew this — and then forgot it, all in the same moment. When Jesus called him out onto the water, Peter stepped out of the boat and walked. Not swam. Walked. As long as he kept his eyes on Jesus, something that should have been impossible was simply happening. But then he noticed the wind. He looked at the waves. And the moment fear replaced trust, he began to sink (Matthew 14:30). The water hadn’t changed. The One standing on it hadn’t moved. He had stopped listening to the voice that called him. He had started watching the storm instead.
Fear does to our faith exactly what it does to a body in water. It tightens. It shallows. It turns what was meant to be rest into resistance. And the more we fight, the deeper we go.
I won’t pretend I have this figured out. There are still moments when I tense up in the water: when the old fear returns and my body forgets what it knows. Faith is like that too. We don’t learn to trust once and carry it forever. We learn it again, in each new situation, each new fear, each new depth we didn’t expect to find ourselves in.
But here is what I keep coming back to: the water was always going to hold me. My fear didn’t change that. It only kept me from resting in it.
God was always going to hold you too.
The only question is whether you are willing to stop fighting long enough to rest.
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