The Wind, the Water & Jody’s Bicycle

I think I have spent an embarrassing amount of my life staring at wind.

Not actual wind, although at this point I would love something outside of myself to blame. I mean the wind of what everybody else is doing, what everybody else has, what God did for them, what He hasn’t done for me yet, what’s wrong with the world, what’s wrong with my life, what could go wrong next, what somebody said, what somebody didn’t say, and whatever fresh catastrophe my phone would like to inform me about before I’ve even finished my coffee.

Then I wonder why I’m anxious.

Girl.

At some point I have to acknowledge that I cannot continuously input fear, comparison, complaints, disappointment, outrage and negativity and then expect peace to be the output.

That math is not mathing.

This morning I found myself back in Matthew 14, reading about Peter walking on water, and something about it bothered me differently this time.

Peter actually walked.

I think sometimes I rush through that because I already know how the story ends. Peter sees the wind, gets afraid, starts sinking, Jesus saves him, little faith, yada yada yada.

Except Peter walked first.

His feet were already doing what should have been impossible.

The water was already holding him.

The miracle was already happening.

Then Matthew 14:30 says, “But when he saw the wind…”

When he saw.

There it was.

The storm didn’t suddenly begin.

The water didn’t suddenly become water.

The wind wasn’t waiting behind a cloud like, “Okay everybody, he’s out of the boat. GO.”

Everything that frightened Peter in verse 30 was already present when he stepped out in verse 29.

The environment didn’t change.

His focus did.

And that sat me all the way down because I started thinking about how many times I have assumed something in my life was falling apart when maybe what actually changed was where I was looking.

I didn’t lose the opportunity.

I lost focus.

I didn’t necessarily lose my faith.

I gave something else too much of my attention.

I didn’t suddenly become incapable of walking through what God called me into.

I just started staring at everything that suggested I couldn’t.

That distinction matters to me because I have missed entirely too much of my own life looking sideways.

I’ve watched God bless somebody else and somehow made their blessing an indictment against mine.

I’ve watched somebody get the opportunity I wanted and immediately started mentally reviewing God’s résumé like there had been some administrative oversight.

Excuse me, Lord. Not sure if You saw that, but she got the thing.

Meanwhile, God has been doing things in my own life that I barely celebrated because they didn’t look like what He was doing for somebody else.

That’s ugly.

Not ugly like “I need to work on that.”

Ugly like I have occasionally stood in the middle of my own answered prayer and complained about the view because I could see somebody else’s blessing from there.

And maybe that’s why Peter’s story hit me differently.

Peter saw Jesus doing something extraordinary and wanted to do it too.

“Lord, if it is You, command me to come to You on the water.”

Jesus said, “Come.”

Peter didn’t move until Jesus invited him.

That means everything God allows me to see is not necessarily an invitation to pursue it.

Some things are simply exposure.

I can admire without acquiring.

I can celebrate without coveting.

I can witness what God is doing through somebody else without assuming it is a preview of what He owes me.

Because exposure becomes dangerous when I turn it into appetite.

Maybe jealousy really is mismanaged exposure sometimes.

I saw something long enough that I started believing I was supposed to have it too.

Now I’m frustrated with God over something He never promised me.

Whew.

And while I was sitting there getting my feelings hurt for free, I noticed something else.

Before Jesus walked on water publicly, He prayed privately.

Matthew 14:23 says Jesus went up on the mountain by Himself to pray.

Then He came walking across the water.

And Peter saw the water.

Peter saw the miracle.

Peter saw the public part.

What Peter did not participate in was the mountain.

And I felt that one somewhere behind my ribs because how many times have I wanted somebody’s water without knowing anything about their mountain?

I see what God is doing through them publicly and think, I want that.

Okay, Jazmin.

Do you want what happened privately too?

Because I love the walking-on-water portion of Christianity. Very cinematic. Wonderful lighting. Put me in the scene.

The mountain at night alone praying?

Suddenly I have errands.

Yet Jesus didn’t separate the two.

There was private communion before public demonstration.

Prayer before power.

Isolation before visibility.

And Peter was trying to reproduce publicly what Jesus had cultivated privately.

That made me wonder whether some of the things I keep calling attacks are actually exposing places where I haven’t built the private discipline necessary to sustain the public thing I’m asking God for.

Because getting out of the boat is one kind of faith.

Staying focused once the wind starts talking is another.

And Lord knows the wind talks.

Mine has a whole podcast.

Sometimes it’s the news. Sometimes it’s comparison. Sometimes it’s complaints. Sometimes it’s scrolling long enough to become dissatisfied with a life I was perfectly grateful for twenty minutes ago. Sometimes it’s repeatedly talking about everything that isn’t working until the problem becomes larger in my mind than the God I’ve been praying to about it.

Then I have the nerve to ask why I don’t have peace.

Because, Jazmin, look at what you have been feeding yourself.

I cannot consume negativity all day and expect joy to magically emerge from the wreckage.

My heart has a diet.

My mind has a diet.

My spirit has a diet.

Eventually what I repeatedly consume becomes the language I use to interpret everything else.

If I constantly consume fear, everything starts looking threatening.

If I constantly consume comparison, everything starts looking insufficient.

If I constantly consume complaints, everything starts looking disappointing.

My life didn’t necessarily get worse.

My lens did.

That doesn’t mean I want to become apathetic, though.

I wrestled with that because I don’t want “protecting my peace” to become Christian language for “I don’t care.”

I want to know what’s happening.

I want injustice to bother me.

I want suffering to disturb me.

I want my heart to remain tender.

I want to be moved by what moves God.

Jesus wasn’t detached from suffering. He wept. He had compassion. He stopped for people everyone else walked past. He was deeply moved.

So this isn’t about closing my eyes.

It’s about choosing what gets to hold them.

There is a difference between awareness and fixation.

There is a difference between compassion and consumption.

There is a difference between knowing there is a storm and spending all day staring at the wind.

Because I can’t control the wind anyway.

That’s the wild part.

I cannot see wind. I can only see what it affects.

The trees bend.

The water moves.

Things start flying around.

I see the evidence of something I cannot control, and then I give all my attention to it as though staring harder is somehow going to make me powerful over it.

That’ll preach to me all by itself.

How much of my anxiety has come from staring at evidence of things I cannot control?

Other people’s decisions.

Other people’s opinions.

The economy.

The news.

Timelines.

Opportunities.

Outcomes.

Who got picked.

Who didn’t.

What happened yesterday.

What might happen tomorrow.

Wind.

Wind.

Wind.

Meanwhile, Jesus is standing on the water.

And somewhere in the middle of all of this, I thought about Jody from Baby Boy, which probably tells you everything you need to know about how my brain works.

Because Jody had observations about everybody.

Yvette was doing too much.

His mama had Melvin in the house.

Sweetpea had issues.

Rodney was a problem.

Everybody was apparently contributing to Jody’s circumstances except the grown man riding a bicycle around Los Angeles with two children by two different women.

Sir.

Perhaps we could redirect the camera.

And unfortunately, I have been spiritually Jody more times than I would like documented.

God, look at them.

God, look at what happened.

God, look at what they got.

God, look at what they said.

God, look at what isn’t working.

God, LOOK.

And I can almost hear Him saying,

Jazmin.

Look at Me.

Oh.

Because perhaps the greatest threat to my peace isn’t always what is happening around me.

Sometimes it’s what I keep choosing to stare at.

There are things I keep praying for God to remove from my mind that I keep voluntarily putting back into it.

Lord, take this comparison away.

opens app.

Lord, give me peace.

checks the news for the ninth time.

Lord, help me stop worrying.

rehearses every possible catastrophic outcome before breakfast.

Girl.

Some things I don’t need to pray away.

Some things I need to stay away from.

That doesn’t make me uninformed. It makes me responsible for what has access to me.

Because my attention is stewardship too.

And maybe that is what God is teaching me.

I have spent years asking Him for more while being careless with where I put my eyes.

More opportunity.

More influence.

More responsibility.

More purpose.

More.

Yet if the wind can have my attention every time it blows, what exactly am I asking Him to give me more of?

Because talent isn’t enough.

Anointing isn’t enough.

Opportunity isn’t enough.

Vision isn’t enough.

An unbreakable life requires unbreakable focus.

Peter proved that to me.

Same Jesus.

Same Peter.

Same water.

Same storm.

The only thing that changed was what Peter was looking at.

He was walking until he looked.

And maybe that is why this feels so personal.

There have been seasons when God was doing something beautiful in my life and I barely experienced it because I was watching what He was doing in somebody else’s.

There have been opportunities I didn’t recognize because they weren’t the opportunities I had been staring at.

There have been blessings I minimized because comparison convinced me they were small.

There have been peaceful days I contaminated with problems that hadn’t even happened yet.

I don’t want to live like that anymore.

I want my heart to break over what breaks God’s heart without letting the entire broken world live rent-free in my head.

I want to be informed without being consumed.

Compassionate without being chronically overwhelmed.

Aware of the wind without worshiping it.

I want to learn to do privately what can sustain me publicly.

I want the mountain before the water.

Prayer before performance.

Presence before platform.

And when God allows me to see somebody else walking in something beautiful, I want to be able to smile and say, “Look at God,” without immediately asking, “When is it my turn?”

Because maybe it already is my turn.

Maybe I’ve just been looking in the wrong direction.

Peter didn’t need calmer water.

He needed refocused eyes.

And maybe I don’t need everything around me to change before I can have peace either.

Maybe I need to stop giving the wind the attention that belongs to Jesus.

Because the wind was blowing when Peter sank.

But here’s what humbled me most:

It was blowing when he walked, too.