Learning to Swim
I don’t know about you, but if I ever have a bad experience with something, I have a tendency to say, “This must not be for me,” and never touch that thing again. A perfect example of this is my early childhood experience with swimming. My parents had enrolled me in swimming lessons, and just a few days later, we found ourselves spending the weekend at our local lake. I was eager to show them what I had learned, and ignoring my dad’s better judgment, I lunged straight into the murky lake waters. The next thing I remember was seeing darkness everywhere, with a bright light in the center and a hand reaching down toward me. Is this… the bright light at the end of the tunnel? Did I just… die?
It turns out I had opened my eyes in the murky waters, looking up to see the sun shining through and my dad reaching down to grab me as quickly as possible. I swallowed a bunch of lake water that day, and yes, it was as awful as you’d imagine it to be. So what did I do with this experience? Well, I decided swimming wasn’t for me.
Years went by. As a teen, not mastering swimming was easier to conceal most of the time. I’d stick my feet in the water with the other girls who didn’t want to get their hair wet. But one day, in my late teens, I was utterly humbled by a group of 5-year-olds I was babysitting at a neighborhood pool (lifeguards were there, so no worries—they were safe). When those kids realized I couldn’t swim, they begged me to try, chanting, “You can do it, Mrs. Christy!” for everyone at the pool to hear. I was pretty embarrassed that day, but I was NOT about to face that fear with eager eyes watching from all around.
I made it all the way through my twenties doing this same thing. In my thirties, my family gained access to a community pool. This regular access to water was a gift, a daily invitation to overcome a lifelong fear. I realized what I had accepted as my lot in life was something I could change, and at 33 years old, I finally learned to swim. I’ll never forget the day I went out into deep water and kept my head up. The feeling of victory was oh so sweet. Swimming is fun and relaxing. I’m still not great at it, but overcoming this fear is one of my favorite small but significant life experiences.
Life is truly amazing in this way: We have the free will to do whatever we want with it. Sometimes we feel like we’re stuck in circumstances that we can actually do something about—a career path we aren’t happy with, a dream we’ve buried in fear, or walls of isolation we’ve built to protect ourselves from hurt that have only led to loneliness and pain. God has given us one precious life with numbered days, and we get to choose what we do with it while we’re here on earth.
Romans 12 challenges us to offer our lives as a sacrifice to God. Of course, this applies to the big things, like sharing the gospel with people we know. But I have to believe that God smiled when He saw me overcome this lifelong fear, too—that this was pleasing to Him. Fear does not come from God, but rather, our enemy. As fear lost its grip in this one area of my life that day, I became a little more like my Father, who radiates joy and peace. Maybe it’s not just the big things that He wants us to offer as a sacrifice to Him, but the ordinary things, too. We can’t control the bad things that happen to us, but we can choose our response, determining to build something beautiful with the broken pieces, reflecting our Father’s character in every area of our lives.
I love The Message translation of Romans 12:1-2:
“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.” Romans 12:1-2 MSG
Are there areas in your everyday life that God wants to transform? What is one fear or negative belief you can overcome as you offer your ordinary life as worship to God?
