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This story is about three accountants who doubted their three engineer friends. They were traveling by train to a conference. The accountants bought three tickets, but the engineers only bought one. "How are three people going to travel on only one ticket?" an accountant asked.
"Watch and you'll see," said an engineer.
They all boarded the train. The accountants took their seats, but the three engineers crammed into a restroom and closed the door behind them. The train departed the station and soon the conductor came through the car asking for tickets. He knocked on the restroom door and said, "Ticket, please." The door opened a crack and a single arm emerges with a ticket in hand. The conductor took it and moved on.
The accountants agree that this is a rather clever idea so after the conference, they decide to duplicate the engineers' feat. They buy only one ticket, but are astonished when the engineers buy no ticket at all! "How are you going to travel without a ticket?" the accountants ask. Watch and you'll see, reply the engineers.
When they boarded the train, the accountants crammed into a restroom with their ticket while the three engineers did the same in a nearby restroom. After the train departed the station, one of the engineers left the restroom and walked over to the restroom where the accountants were hiding. He knocked on the door and said, "Ticket, please."

 

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Somerset Maugham said it best in his autobiography, Summing Up, "I knew that I had no lyrical quality, a small vocabulary, little gift of metaphor. The original and striking simile never occurred to me. Poetic flights...were beyond my powers. On the other hand, I had an acute power of observation, and it seemed to me that I could see a great many things that other people missed. I could put down in clear terms what I saw...I knew that I should never write as well as I could wish, but I thought, with pains, that I could arrive at writing as well as my natural defects allowed." Somerset Maugham discovered the secret of genius.

The point is that life does not ask us to become what we are not. The fig tree was only required to produce figs. No more. You and I are asked only to accomplish what our natural gifts allow, but we are asked to accomplish just that.

 

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A new principal was checking over his school on the first day. Passing the stockroom, he was startled to see the door wide open and teachers going in and out, carrying off books and supplies. The school he came from had a check-out system that required the teachers to indicate what supplies they had obtained. Curious about the practice here he asked the school custodian, "Do you think it's wise to keep the stockroom unlocked and to let the teachers take things without asking?" The custodian responded, "We trust them with the children, don't we?"

Jesus wants us to trust in him and let the child within to be free

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There is an old story that has often been re-told in especially the Eastern Orthodox part of the church. According to the tale, a devout abbot from a monastery decided to take a prolonged spiritual retreat in a small cabin located on a remote island in the middle of a large lake. He told his fellow monks that he wanted to spend his days in prayer so as to grow closer to God. For six months he remained on the island with no other person seeing him or hearing from him in all that time. But then one day, as two monks were standing near the shore soaking up some sunshine, they could see in the distance a figure moving toward them. It was the abbot, walking on water, and coming toward shore. After the abbot passed by the two monks and continued on to the monastery, one of the monks turned to the other and said, "All these months in prayer and the abbot is still as stingy as ever. After all, the ferry costs only 25 cents!"

Humor aside, the point of the story is that it's amazing how easily we may sometimes miss the significance of something that is right in front of us. We think we know the meaning of this incident of Jesus' walking on the water, but do we really?

Did you know that the bathtub was invented in 1850? The telephone was invented in 1875. "Just think," someone said, "You could have sat in the bathtub for 25 years without the phone ringing."  It never fails, does it? Just when you think you will have some peace and quiet, the telephone rings, or the baby cries, or a water pipe breaks, or the boss calls you into her office. Peace is a precious commodity and it is so, so elusive. 

Dante, the great poet of the Renaissance, was exiled from his home in Florence, Italy. Depressed by this cruel turn of fate, he decided to walk from Italy to Paris, where he could study philosophy, in an effort to find a clue to the meaning of life. In his travels, Dante found himself a weary pilgrim, forced to knock at the door of Santa Croce Monastery to find refuge from the night. A surly brother within was finally aroused. He came to the door, flung it open, and in a gruff voice asked, "What do you want?" Dante answered in a single word, "Peace." 

H. G. Wells was one of the best educated, most creative men of our time. He was also an atheist. He said in his autobiography: "I cannot adjust my life to secure any fruitful peace.  Here I am at sixty-five still seeking for peace...Dignified peace...is just a hopeless dream." 

Peace is a beautiful word, is it not? Yet it is a word that is a stranger to many people today. The fast-paced life that many of us lead provides us with an unprecedented measure of material possessions, but it does not provide us with peace. Stress is our constant companion, anxiety haunts our dreams. What if we should be downsized out of a job, what if we were ill for a prolonged period of time, what if our next project is a failure? The disciples were not the only ones to long for peace in a raging storm. 

Where do you find peace? That is the longing of every heart. The experience of the disciples is an experience we will all have eventually " out in a boat in a terrible storm and no peace in sight...or is there?