Unlikely Places: Swimming Continued

If you don't already, allow me to highly recommend reading the comments to whatever this blog is; I've known for a long time that everyone who reads this blog has far more interesting insights than I can conceive of, and the people who comment here serve only to prove that. (I only wish y'all wrote more on your blogs!! I love hearing all that y'all have to say, and hope to hear what it is that you spend your time thinking about!) To start this post, here are some that y'all left on the last post:

"I totally agree, God never intended for us to try and walk it out on our own strength." You know, this is what I was trying, rather violently and unsuccessfully, to say in those flailed words below, so I'm glad that you got it, Jessica. Oh, and I really, really didn't want to do swimming either...but it ended up being one of the greatest experiences of my time at ORU. Look for the lessons.

"In my swimming class, we'd all take turns and watch each other, there was no hiding the fear, either you got over it or you were scared and every one knew which one it was. I kinda wish it was harder to hide our problems in the church. Ya know?" You completely knocked it out, Malia. But, you know, instead of wishing that it was tougher to hide my problems I find I more often wish that I had the courage to admit my problems and deal with them in the context of a healthy community. I think that everyday I'm moving closer to that, but it's definitely a struggle.

How do we find such a healthy community? (which is the segue* now into the meat of the post)

True community arrives whenever we say, a la Aaron Weiss, "If I'm afraid and you're afraid, then we don't have to be afraid anymore," and agree to put down our weapons against one another (isolation, rejection, abandonment, negativity, fakeness, condemnation, et al.) and choose instead to humbly love, one broken piece to the other.

An illustration of this is found in the story of Josh from Beginning Swimming (which is certainly not his real name). I had passed my swimming proficiency test (25m front swim, 25m back swim, 2min tread) very early in the semester, partially because my fear of water was not as developed as many of the others in the class and partially because my feet and hands are like natural flippers, so I've got quite a distinct advantage over the common "well-proportioned" man. Still, I waited until after class so that if I would have failed, as few a number of people as possible would be around to see it.

Josh attempted it a couple of weeks later, after a handful of others had completed various portions of the test. In the middle of class, he got out of the water and told our instructor that he thought he was ready. He began the long journey down toward the deep end. She swam down. We all watched at the edge, standing at the various depths at which we could keep our heads above water by standing on our tip toes.

He jumped in and began swimming toward us on his back. Now, I'm certainly not a swimmer of any merit (I mean, I was in Beginning Swimming). But everybody else seemed to have trouble getting anywhere when they were swimming compared to me. Like, I definitely wasn't fast, but I was always moving when I wanted to be (and even when I wasn't really trying to be). Josh was one of those who splashed a lot and moved through the water very little. It was like one of those nature documentaries, where the great white is devouring the family of sea lions, only the violence on the surface lasted more than mere seconds.

Minute after minute passed as we watched Josh thrash about in the water, fighting with what seemed to be his whole life for every inch. But we weren't just passively watching. We were shouting and cheering and encouraging and doing our very best to will Josh halfway across the pool. But, you know, it's strange now thinking about it--not one of us yelled anything all that practical, or at least, what you'd think would be practical.

You'd think we would have yelled out corrections to his form, or the distance he had left to go, or instructions for every motion, but instead we just yelled out unmitigated support. "You've got this!" "You can do it!" "You're doing great!"

These kinds of things probably would have seemed to ludicrous to an actual swimmer passing by, since Josh obviously wasn't doing very well. But for those of us in the pool, we loved him and we saw only success in each failing stroke. Maybe it was because we didn't know what we were shouting about, or maybe it was because when we looked at Josh, we saw ourselves; our hopes and our fears swam alongside him.

But, strangely enough, he was making it. Whether he was riding on our encouragement or the current from the deep end, he was less than five feet from the ladder which was our finishing mark. And then it happened.

He tried to turn his head to see where he was at. His body failed to properly balance itself. His face ended up underwater. Struggling to surface, he turned himself perpendicular to the path he had been on. We screamed as passionately as we could at him. He was so close. He started to panic. He started coughing. He thought he was going to drown. His hand instinctively grabbed the lifeguard buoy that the instructor had held the whole time.

He had failed. Four or five feet from the finish line, he had failed in front of his friends, peers, and most fervent supporters. There was a silence as he settled his mind and discovered just how close he'd come.

And then we cheered. Josh had failed the proficiency, but what he had done had been an incredible feat of endurance and mental fortitude. And we cheered for him. We knew that he'd pass the proficiency test, sooner rather than later, and that what he most needed at that moment was the same unconditional support which we had given him throughout.

Imagine if the Church was like that.

Instead of everybody yelling what you should or should not be doing instead of what you are or are not doing, instead of the constant judging of whether your Christianity is kosher enough, instead of the disgusting and depraved response of fully rejecting our failures, imagine a Church filled with unconditional support that was actually unconditional.

In the meantime, I wish fully peace, love, and joy to you all.


* I totally thought that this word was spelled "segway" until FireFox red underlined it. After ninjawords and dictionary.com confirmed the incorrectitude, the OneLook Reverse Dictionary came to the rescue.