John names the hidden engine of a sane life: love that disarms fear. God is not an object you can seize with the eyes; the only credible “sighting” is what happens between people when they choose costly goodwill. Love becomes proof not by argument but by inhabitation: it moves in, rearranges the inner house, and the anxious self that lives on threat starts to loosen its grip. Judgment, here, is less a courtroom than the moment you finally stand before reality without the armor of self-justification; love gives confidence because it trains you to live unprotected. Mark stages the same psychology as weather. The disciples are competent, faithful, and still trapped in headwind; effort doesn’t save them from exhaustion. Jesus “would have passed by” like a theophany that doesn’t force itself—presence offered, not imposed. They misread help as a ghost because fear distorts perception; then a voice names identity, and the nervous system settles. The real rebuke is not their weakness but their dullness after the loaves: they have seen abundance and still live as if scarcity rules, so their hearts stay “blinded,” i.e., defended. Taken together, the texts insist that fear is not defeated by more control but by deeper trust embodied as love. You learn who God is by practicing a love that makes you less reactive, less suspicious, less in need of enemies. The miracle is not mainly the feet on water; it is the unhooking of the terrified imagination. Speculation, but the same seed shows up elsewhere: Buddhism’s metta softens the fear-bound self; Stoicism’s oikeiosis widens concern beyond the private ego; Sufism’s mahabbah reads the world as held in divine tenderness; the Bhagavad Gita’s bhakti trades panic for devotion; Taoism’s wu-wei refuses the frantic grasping that multiplies dread. In each, love or alignment dissolves the inner weather that makes ghosts of ordinary help.