Eleven Years of Swimming

He knew that beach. That is the part he keeps coming back to.

He had swum there since he was seven. He knew where the sandbar sat and how the water goes green over it, and he had walked out past it a hundred times with his shoes in his hand. So when the shore stopped getting closer, his first thought was not that he was in trouble. His first thought was that he was not trying hard enough.

So he tried harder.

Four minutes. Four whole minutes, front crawl, head down, driving straight at the beach, at a line of towels and a red flag and a woman folding a windbreak, and every time he lifted his face the towels were exactly where they had been. Not further. Not closer. Exactly where they had been.

That was the moment the water stopped being water and became a fact. Something under him was moving out at a speed he could not out swim, and he had spent the whole of his strength proving it.

He got his head up and there was somebody already in the water, forty feet away and coming, and this man was not shouting encouragement. He was shouting an instruction, and the instruction made no sense at all.

Stop swimming.

Everything in a drowning body says no. Everything says the swimming is the only thing keeping you here. But he was finished, genuinely finished, so he stopped, and he went flat on his back with his arms out, and the sky came into view for the first time in four minutes.

And the arm came under him about six seconds later.

And now I am going to stop saying he.

Because you know that water. Yours has no sand in it. Yours is eleven years long, and you have been swimming the whole time at a shore that has not moved an inch: trying to get back to being a man your father would recognize, trying to get back to being a woman who deserves the people in her kitchen, trying to out swim one year of your life that you cannot out swim.

And what nobody has been able to tell you, because it sounds like the worst advice ever given, is that the swimming is most of what is drowning you.

Going still is not giving up

Let me be very clear about one thing before I say anything else, because on this subject a beautiful sentence can do real damage and I am not willing to risk it.

Going still means stopping the self rescue. It does not mean stopping anything else.

It does not mean coming off your medication. It does not mean missing the appointment. It does not mean walking out of the program, standing down the counselor, canceling the Tuesday, or telling the friend who checks on you every week that you have got this now. Those people are not the current. They are the arm. Exodus 14:14 puts it plainly: the Lord fights for you while you hold your peace, and holding your peace has never once meant waving off the people standing at the water's edge. The Holy Spirit is not in competition with your counselor. He is very often the reason you kept the appointment. God has been putting hands in that water for years and some of them have your name in their phone, and letting go of them is not stillness, it is going under politely.

The thrash is the thing that goes. The thrash is the private, exhausting, eleven year project of getting yourself back to shore under your own power so that you never have to be the person who had to be pulled out.

That is what you are putting down. Nothing else. Scripture carries no record of the Spirit asking a drowning man for a better stroke, and He is not asking you for one now.

Now hear how the rescue is described by a man who had been in the water.

He reached from on high and took hold of me. He drew me out of the great waters.Psalm 18:16

Every verb in it belongs to God. He reached. He took hold. He drew.

There is nothing in that sentence for the drowning man to do, and I want you to notice that the man who wrote it was a soldier, a fighter, somebody with a documented history of taking on things much larger than himself. He is not a passive person. He is simply telling the truth about how he got out of that particular water, and the truth is that somebody came in after him.

Reached from on high. That is a long way down for an arm to travel, and it says something about the intention behind it. Nobody reaches that far by accident.

And here is the turn, and it is the thing your eleven years have been built to avoid.

You are not being asked to become strong enough to deserve the arm. You never were. In Christ you are already held, and the standing you have been swimming towards has been under you since before you started, and the reason the shore never got closer is that you were swimming towards something you were already standing on. Hebrews 4:10 says the one who enters God's rest has ceased from his own works. Not finished them. Ceased. And His Spirit has been holding that ground steady under you through every one of the eleven years you spent trying to earn it.

Stillness is not surrender to the water. Stillness is surrender to the rescuer. It looks identical from the beach and it is the exact opposite thing.