According to the gospel accounts, it was Jesus who first changed Simon’s name to Cephas, which is Aramaic for Peter and Greek for “rock.” And if there was ever a moment when Peter lived up to that name, it was the time he tried to walk on water, because the result was pretty much what you would expect from a rock—he sank!

He doesn’t sink right away, mind you. He actually takes a few tentative steps toward Jesus before he becomes scared and starts to go down like a stone. “Lord, save me,” Peter cries out, and Jesus does, reaching out his hand and hauling him over to the boat, so that the other disciples can pull him safely on board.

And then come those awful words: “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”

All of us can relate to Peter, of course—because like him, we have each had moments of faith and moments of doubt … times when we were bold enough to follow Jesus and times when we became so frightened that we cried out to be rescued.

Traditionally, this episode has been portrayed as one of Peter’s failures. But I sometimes wonder if that is the correct way to understand it. For example, what if this story had had another ending? What if Peter had actually been successful in his little stroll out there upon the open water?

That would certainly make it a more dramatic story. But if you ask me, it would also make it a more dangerous one. In other words, if Peter never sank—if he was able to walk across the water just fine all by himself—then he might eventually conclude that there were a whole lot of other things that he could take care of all on his own.

Put another way, our doubts and fears may hinder us from time to time, but they also remind us of why we need a Savior. After all, if we could handle life all by ourselves, then chances are, that’s exactly what we would start doing.

Crying out for help, when we begin to sink, is not a bad thing … and neither is it a sign of failure. Not crying out for help—or worse still, pretending that we will never need to, because we are perfectly capable of managing things all on our own—now, that’s a sign that we have failed to understand why Jesus came in the first place.