Mary-Elizabeth’s Messages
HOW TO WALK ON WATER

At the start of the war in Ukraine, I got a group email saying how “devastating our world is right now,” and how the Russian invasion had shaken us all.

I furrowed my brow: Though I didn’t condone the attack, I wasn’t feeling shaken about it.

Neither was I feeling heartbroken nor helpless, or in need of support dealing with those feelings, which the email was offering. Out of curiosity more than anything, I kept reading.

Though my curiosity didn’t kill me, I was questioning myself by the end of the message:

Am I a heartless heifer or what for not feeling down about what’s happening? I thought.

Fast forward to that afternoon. Another group email arrived. It opened with, “The world is heart breaking and soul crushing right now.” Not only because of the war, the writer said, but threats to trans- and voting rights in the U.S., the pandemic etc. etc.

But unlike my response to the earlier message, I didn’t read the later one and question myself for not feeling down in the dumps. Instead, I told myself the truth:

No one can ever feel so down as to lighten another person’s load.

When we feel down, we’re in tune with problems, not solutions.

I’ve had my fair share of feeling down and will surely feel down again, so that is NOT a condemnation of anyone dealing with difficult feelings. But it is a recommendation to ease off the tales of doom and gloom.

Factual or not, doom and gloom stories stoke fear, which is the mother of bad-feeling emotions that bar us from walking on water and seeing a path forward.

Matthew 14:29-32 reads:

And when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus.

But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me.

And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?

And when they were come into the ship, the wind ceased.

Metaphysically, walking on water means rising above the choppy sea of collective consciousness.

I opened the first group email feeling fine. But hearing that my fellow readers were feeling heartbroken about Ukraine made me think that maybe I was detached or something. That is, until I wasn’t willing to indulge that story anymore.

I wasn’t a heartless heifer, I was enjoying the fruits of my labor by walking on water:

For years, I’d been building the mental muscles to maintain a sense of peace when things looked bad or to return to peace quickly when I couldn’t.

Peace on earth begins with peaceful people—the kind of people who can see possibilities.

So, yeah, Jesus, wherefore didst I doubt?

Walking on water means breaking with prevailing thinking and not letting outer factors—from emails to traffic jams to annoying people to invasions—hijack our inner world.

By our inner world, I mean the way we think and feel.

And contrary to prevailing thinking, people and events don’t make us feel a certain way (like I said here) but the stories we choose to put on them do.

When [Jesus and Peter] were come into the ship, the wind ceased…

I interpret coming into the ship as meaning entering a stable place / a place of peace.

Notice that occurred BEFORE the wind—difficult external conditions—stopped.

As within, so without.

Or the circumstances around us reflect what’s happening in us, not the other way around.

While it’s fine to call on Jesus whenever you want, recognize that you can save yourself from most encounters with choppy waters—upsetting collective thinking or your own—by prioritizing your inner peace and changing the stories you tell yourself until you find it.

An embarrassing childhood incident “inspired” me to start telling myself the tale that intelligent people formed opinions about everything. After decades of that, I decided that I preferred to be free of that burden than appear smart, and my “peace quotient” went up.

As I got older and wiser still, I started paying loose attention to events that I couldn’t meaningfully do anything about, like wars in far-flung places.

But don’t take that to mean that I don’t care about the welfare of people. It means that I think I can cause a potentially global ripple effect of good by caring for people in my own part of the world, specifically in my neighborhood.

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