Riding the Waves

This summer I asked for an unusual birthday present: swim lessons for two weeks. I hadn’t taken swim lessons since I was probably six, and had never felt comfortable putting my face in the water unless I had a huge mask to cover my eyes and nose. As this was to be a year of facing fears – and it has been, more than I even wanted given all the grieving for friends’ losses that has come along with it – I just had this feeling that learning to swim again was an important thing.

I think suffering has a way of being a crossroads of trust when it comes to God. I either push God away, or I cling to him. In this year, I have come to God and brought my anger, my confusion, and my questions, and I have surrendered them all to him….but still, I did not feel safe with him, because after all, he has allowed such terrible things in the lives of my friends. It was especially the deaths of two precious little babies at birth that has been hard for me to bear as I welcomed my own daughter this year.

Being in the water became a metaphor for me this summer, a metaphor of learning to feel safe with God. Each lesson had its little triumph – using goggles for the first time, breathing underwater through my nose as I did a sommersault for a kick-turn, jumping off the diving board – and the more lessons I took, the more I was able to relax. The stronger my strokes became. The more confident I was that when I was asked to swim the length of the pool, I could do it. My fellow swimmers were three nine-year-old boys, and we even learned to do relay races with one person in front moving their arms, and the other person moving their legs – two people moving as one swimmer. Another special moment for me was when I realized about a week into my lessons that I had not tried floating yet – something I had never done because I always sank due to my anxiety and discomfort. And now I can float!

On my birthday this year our family went to the beach and my mom and husband watched our kids as I swam in the ocean. I walked into the water and just began to laugh. My heart fluttered a little as a wave built and swept toward me, but I just dove right into water and came up on the other side. Sometimes I turned and rode the waves into the shore, just floating.

To be amid the ocean, so immense, so powerful and awesome in its magnitude and its being, is such a parallel to me of God. And there are things that you never can predict, such as riptides – but in every moment, you always have the choice of fighting it, or floating. It turns out that the way to survive a riptide is to relax, to swim along the shore until it releases you and then you can return to land.

Life this year has had its share of riptides and waves. I am learning to float, to dive, and to swim. I am learning to surrender.