ghost

make a wish, originally uploaded by sheelajoy.

'There’s an interesting thing here. [Jesus] is approaching the boat, walking on the water, and…he went to walk past them. I’ve always puzzled about that. He went to walk past them. Why did he go to walk past them? Hadn’t he come to help them? And when you think about it, this is not a placid lake that he is walking on… These are 6-foot waves that Jesus is walking over. And he goes to walk past them. Past them! He was doing better than they were with 6 oars and all those heavy men in the boat. Of course, he is God, but I wonder whether he went to walk past them because they thought he was a ghost. They saw him and did not invite him into it. They were still straining to do it on their own. Maybe they did not recognise him because he was in another form to them as they looked at him in the storm.

When you are in the storm, you often see God in a form that isn’t him. He seems distorted, he seems something other, he doesn’t seem the Jesus you know or the God you can trust. You see him as a ghost. You see him as something else'.

- Jill Briscoe, talking about Mark 6:45-52