Between Faith and Doubt

Yesterday my mom was telling me about the sermon given at Elim that morning. In it, the pastor drew from the following gospel reading about Jesus walking on water.

Matthew 14:22-33
22 Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowd. 23 After he had dismissed them, he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, 24 but the boat was already a considerable distance[a] from land, buffeted by the waves because the wind was against it.
25 During the fourth watch of the night Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. 26 When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. “It’s a ghost,” they said, and cried out in fear.
27 But Jesus immediately said to them: “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.”
28 “Lord, if it’s you,” Peter replied, “tell me to come to you on the water.”
29 “Come,” he said.
Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. 30 But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!”
31 Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?”
32 And when they climbed into the boat, the wind died down. 33 Then those who were in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

The most striking part of this reading, said Pastor P., is not so much what it reveals about God but what it reveals about man. Each one of us, like Peter, is caught between faith and doubt. Though I didn’t hear the details of the sermon, this message struck me.

Surely it must be true. Each one of us is at different points along the continuum between faith and doubt, between certainty and uncertainty. Furthermore, each one of us moves forward and backward along the continuum at different points in time. I’m still sorting out what we must do to move closer to faith; surely our actions (to the extent that we are able to follow the teachings of Jesus or the other Manifestations) become reinforcing of our progress.
How often we, like Peter, let our fears overcome us in the present and even detach ourselves from evidence of our progress even as it’s happening right before our eyes. Our fears become blinders.
A bunch of metaphors for this very human way of progressing come to mind, but I’ll mention just one (humbly admitting that nothing I can come up is quite as powerful of this message of the Gospel). When climbing a cinder cone volcano, one takes two steps forward and slides one step back pretty much the whole way up. Such a hike is quite arduous (I think I’ll avoid all cinder cones in the future). Yet, with patience, faith, determination, and effort, we can reach the summit.