I'd be lying if I said that I was anywhere near good at swimming. I'm not. But I know enough to get by, owing to the fact that I took swimming lessons when I was younger. Sadly, they never turned me into a pro athlete, but they did teach me one very important thing: I'm terrible at floating. Like, really bad.
My cousin could live the rest of her life flat on her back in the water and be just fine, provided someone brought her food and sunscreen every now and then. I'm not sure what went wrong, but somewhere along the way, that gene definitely skipped over me.
One of the requirements in a swimming class I took was that you had to be able to float, first on your back and then on your stomach, for a certain amount of time, which I just barely made after several failed attempts. Each time I thought I had finally got the hang of it, my feet would slowly start to sink until the rest of me followed.
I can definitely resonate with the phrase "sink or swim", because that's basically all I do when I get in a body of water of any kind. I'm either sinking, swimming, or trying to float, which translates to sinking.
People have told me that the reason I can't seem to stay up when I'm floating is because I'm too tense. Apparently, if I would just relax and breathe a little, everything would be fine. The problem is, it's kind of hard to relax when you're lying on top of the water. I mean, it feels like you could go down any minute. And if you're breathing, you risk inhaling water, which feels especially bad when it's full of chlorine. So I can't say it feels all that relaxing to just trust the water to hold me up.
The problem is, if I was ever stuck in a body of water for any extended period of time, I'd drown pretty quickly. Even though swimming would keep me up for a little while, I wasn't made to swim non-stop forever, and eventually, I'd sink.
This is what's wrong with the whole sink-or-swim mentality; we weren't made to be constantly active. It's so easy to think that we have to keep working, or that we have to constantly measure up to some crazy standard, or that if we're not always giving 100% of our effort, none of it counts at all. But we all need a breather sometimes. And we can't give 100% if we're not taking time to recharge.
I think a lot of people could relate to my floating crisis when it comes to their everyday lives. They're really bad at taking time to relax because they're afraid that once they do, they'll be overwhelmed with everything they've left undone.
There's a well-known Bible verse that I really like, and it's found in Matthew 11:28:
"Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." (NKJV)
Jesus is speaking here, and it's obvious that in the midst of the world's demanding sink-or-swim routine, He wants to bring another option to the table: float. Rest. Breathe. Unwind.
Sink or swim sounds okay until you realize that you can't swim anymore. There never really is a choice in it, because regardless of what you choose, in the end you'll still sink. But when you float, instead of fighting the water or letting it overwhelm and suffocate you, you simply float on top of it. It's pretty counterintuitive to rest in order to stay on top of things, but with God, it really works.
I want to rest in Jesus' love. In a world of sink or swim, I choose to float.