I didn’t learn how to swim until I was sixteen.
I grew up in Upstate New York, so it wasn’t like I had the opportunity to do a lot of swimming. I remember getting in a friend’s pool once in the middle of June and the water temperature was a crisp sixty degrees.
We had an indoor pool at our high school. It was a beautiful pool and heated. The only time it wasn’t so beautiful was when someone pulled the fire alarm in the dead of winter and sent a bunch of kids fleeing from the pool out into the snow.
And of course, it wasn’t so beautiful for me when it was time for our swimming unit in P.E. I’m still not sure how I managed to pass the unit when I was fifteen except that if you’re quiet and don’t complain, if you keep moving and splash around a bit … the teachers will usually overlook you.
Unfortunately they weren’t able to overlook me the next year, what with all the screaming and flailing around.
P.E. teachers are notoriously … well … evil … and one of the things they had us do during the swimming unit was create a whirlpool in the shallow end of the pool. I’m sure they were thinking they were just giving us a cardiovascular workout by having us move en mass in a circle. Simple at first until those crazy, psychotic laws of physics kick in.
The more we moved, the harder it was to stay in the circle, the harder it was not to be flung out into the deep end.
It was probably no big deal for everyone else since they could swim. What did they care if they wound up in water over their heads?
But for me … I was terrified.
I fought hard. But, in the end, I only remember clinging to the side of the pool, my legs kicking at the water behind me as I tried desperately to hang on.
I’m sure I made quite a spectacle of myself because when the rest of the class moved on to the next unit and left the pool until next year, I was told to stay behind.
I spent the rest of my P.E. year in the pool getting one on one swimming instruction.
It wasn’t easy. I was terrified of the water, terrified of putting my head under, terrified of just about everything, but I had an incredibly patient teacher. Sometimes her only job was to walk alongside of the pool as I swam, holding out a long pole for me to grab if I started to panic.
I never did grab that pole, even on the day that I made it out into the deep end for the first time. I never grabbed the pole. In fact I was sort of angry at it. It just seemed to be in the way.
I didn’t need the pole. It was enough that my teacher was there. It was enough that she believed in me.
I’ve been reading Timothy Keller’s King’s Cross this past week. He writes quite a bit on suffering and trust.
He writes of God saying: “I want you to keep trusting me; to stick with me, not turn back, not give up, turn to me in all the disappointments and injustices that will happen to you. I’m going to take you places that will make you say, ‘Why in the world are you taking me there?’ Even then, I want you to trust me.”
Trust is a hard thing especially when fear gets in the way, when we don't know where we're going, when we feel like we're about to be thrown into the deepest waters.
And much like my journey learning to swim, we can either choose to leave the pool and run from our fears, or we can hope that someone takes notice, that God sees us and sends us someone to walk alongside us and guide us in overcoming that fear.
It takes an abundance of faith.
But God proves Himself over and over and over again. He never fails.
All we need is faith.
