Weekly Words

Faith

We have all heard that fear is the greatest obstacle to faith. However, I learned something more about both the other day at my son’s swim lesson. Bryce had his first swim lesson at six months old. We would get in the water together, I would hold him, and we would do different exercises together. Each lesson would amaze me as I watched Bryce’s increasing comfort in the water because of his unyielding faith in the security of being in my arms. By one, he was comfortable going under the water and coming back up without crying. Then, the swim lessons stopped and they did not resume until Bryce was three years old. It was the same pool, it was the same water, but there was a different little boy. In that period of time between swim lessons, Bryce gained a fear of the water.

At one of Bryce’s last swim lessons I was amused as Bryce adjusted the instructions of the teacher to fit his fears of the water. First the teacher told him to grab a flotation device, stretch his arms out, lay flat and kick. Instead of stretching his arms out and grabbing the device, he brought the device to his chest, placed the device under his arms, and made sure it was securely under him so that he would not go under the water. Then, instead of laying horizontal in the water and kicking, Bryce decided that he would be more secure if he stood up vertically in the water and kicked. All of a sudden Bryce’s teacher starts laughing because Bryce is kicking frantically, but going nowhere.

It was at this point that my sermonic antennae went up and my theological telescope began to focus. Bryce’s fear of the water, lack of faith in the buoyancy of the device his teacher had given him, and lack of faith in the instructions his teacher had told him translated into Bryce doing his own thing, kicking as hard as he could but not going anywhere. In some sense, many of us are like Bryce in the waters of life. We are kicking, maybe even pedaling and swinging our arms, but we are going nowhere and not making any progress. My child needed to have faith that what his teacher had given him would hold him up, and if he did what the teacher said, he would get back to the bank of the pool. As children of God, we often lack the faith that God has equipped us with what we need to keep us afloat in life, and God has instructions for our lives that if we would just follow we could get somewhere. Still we know what Bryce intuitively knew in that swim class—that faith, just like laying horizontally in the water, means putting ourselves in a vulnerable position. Nevertheless, it sometimes takes being vulnerable to make progress. It may take the vulnerability of trust in a relationship; the vulnerability of following our calling no matter what; the vulnerability of listening to our spirit when it opposes conventionality and popular opinion.

What Bryce taught me in that swimming pool was simply this: faith is not just something we need to be pleasing to God, it also something we need to make progress for ourselves.

Humbly in Christ’s Love,
Pastor B.A. Jackson