You Did Not Climb Out

He had swum off that beach since he was six years old.

That is the part he always says first, whenever he tells it, and he is not boasting. He is explaining why it took him so long to understand what was happening. He knew that water. He knew where the rocks were and which way the sand shelved and what the flag on the pole meant. He was not a tourist and he was not careless and he had not had a drink.

He was about forty strokes out when he noticed the umbrella.

That is how you find out, apparently. Not a wave, not a bang, nothing dramatic. You look back at the shore and you pick something to measure yourself against, a red umbrella near the steps, and you swim toward it hard for a while, properly hard, and then you look up and the umbrella is smaller.

He did everything right. He did not fight it head on. He turned and swam along the beach the way you are supposed to. He kept his breathing flat and his head low, and for a few minutes he was quite proud of how calm he was being about it.

Then the calm ran out, at about the same time as his arms did, and he stopped swimming and just lay in the water, and the noise of the beach was already too far away to be part of his life any more.

He has never been able to describe the next bit properly. There was no shout and no splash he can remember. There was just a hand, closing round his wrist, from behind, and a board arriving under his chest, and somebody breathing very hard beside his ear and saying something in a completely ordinary voice.

For eleven years afterwards he told that story at tables and at work and once at a wedding, and he always told it the same way: I stayed calm, that is the whole reason I am here.

He never learned the name of the man who came in after him.

Read the grammar of the sentence

Almost everybody has one of these. Yours may have no water in it at all.

There was a season, or a night, or a stretch of about eight months, and you were in something you had no way out of, and you are on this side of it now. And somewhere in the years since, you have settled on a way of telling it that leaves the whole thing in your own hands. You got lucky. The timing was good. You finally hit the bottom and decided. Somebody happened to call. You are stubborn, and stubborn is what saved you. The Holy Spirit has been waiting a long time to read you the other account of that same night, the one Scripture keeps, and it is told in a very different grammar.

I am not going to argue with you about it. I want to do something much simpler and much harder. I want to read you one sentence and ask you to notice who is doing what in it.

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

Count the verbs. Reached. Took hold. Drew out. Three of them, and every single one belongs to Him. Now look for what the man in the psalm does. He is in the water. That is his entire contribution to the passage, and he wrote it himself, with a harp in his hands, as king, with nothing left to prove to anybody.

That is the grammar, and the grammar is the theology. He reaches. You were reached. Psalm 18:16 has held that word order for three thousand years, and the Holy Spirit is not about to rearrange it to make anybody more comfortable.

And I know why you resist it, because it is not humility that fights this and it is not pride either. It is fear. If you were the one who climbed out, then you know how it was done and you could do it again if you ever had to. But if an arm came in from somewhere outside you, then you are somebody things happen to, and that is a much less comfortable place to sleep at night. I am not going to talk you out of the feeling. I am going to put something underneath it, because Deuteronomy 33:27 says the everlasting arms are underneath, which is a strange thing to say to a person who is standing up, and the Spirit of God does not name arms He has no intention of using.

So hear this carefully, because it is the trade nobody tells you about. Yes, you lose the credit. You also lose the responsibility for arranging the next one, and you have been carrying that quietly for years. Paul writes rescue in three tenses in 2 Corinthians 1:10, delivered and delivers and will deliver. The Holy Spirit works that middle one, and He works it through every night you sleep straight through.

Two things I will not do to you here.

I will not dress the water up. There are people who tell that part slowly, because a deep pit makes a better story, and I have no interest in walking you back down there so a paragraph can have more weight. Enough to be recognized, and then the arm. You lived in it. You know exactly what it was like. We do not need to visit.

And I will not pretend that being reached means sitting still and waiting. The hand that came round that man's wrist belonged to a person, with lungs and a name and a board under his arm. God does this constantly. He sends people, and He sends doctors, and He sends the friend who will not stop knocking, and He sends the number you can call at three in the morning when everything in you says nobody is there. Reaching for help is not the opposite of being rescued. It is very often what being rescued looks like from the inside, and it never once cancels the fact that He is the one who reached first.

And I am going to put that number in the paragraph rather than leave it as a figure of speech. If what you are in right now has thoughts in it about ending your life, or about simply not being here any more, tell one living human being out loud tonight. Your doctor. A friend. Whoever is nearest. In the United States you can call or text 988 and a person answers. Anywhere else, emergency services or the crisis line where you live does the same job. That is not a failure of faith and it makes nobody a burden. Acts 27 brings a whole ship's company ashore on boards and broken pieces, and Scripture still calls that God saving every one of them, and the Holy Spirit has never been too proud to work through somebody with lungs and a board under their arm. Reaching for one of those hands is obedience, not defeat.

One more, and it is for the person I can feel reading this with their jaw set.

If this is not your first time in the water, you have not used something up. There is no ledger. There is no ration. Nobody in the whole of Scripture is ever told they have had their turn, and the ones He goes after hardest are the ones who have been carried before. The shame you feel about being back here is not from Him: the Holy Spirit convicts a person about what they are doing and never about how often they have needed help.