Over the Deep Blue SEA

Rubber orange arm floaties. They weren't the most chic accessory ever. The point may have been to keep toddlers from drowning, but perhaps I was a disproportionate three-year-old. To me they presented the unavoidable dilemma of restricting vital arm motions and encouraging me to face- plant into the chlorine rather than remain upright. I hated them and avoided them at all cost.

One slight problem. If I told you how old I was when I finally learned to swim, you'd laugh in my face. So I won't. But trust me, it was ridiculous. Going sans floatie was seriously living on the edge for a little kid. I had a secret weapon though. Dad.

The deep end, with it's enticingly azure water was so much more intriguing than the shallow end of the pool where I usually lingered near the steps and the stainless steel railing. Inch by inch I would step along until the little shelf where the floor began to drop farther away from the surface. It was over my head and my feet didn't like the feeling of losing the texture of cement below.

One day as I sat pool side, tiny feet dangling in the deep end, Dad said the iconic words "Jump in. I'll catch you."

"YES, please!" Was my first thought, but then something along the lines of "Heck, NO" quickly followed. I mean, what if he missed? I didn't know how long it would take before I drowned, but it had to be something like three seconds...that's quite a gamble.

Deliberation and fear eventually gave way to curiosity. I stepped back a few feet to get a good running start (which you should never do at a pool kids) and then I jumped. The wind rushed against my face and I was suspended in mid-air for what felt like ages. Then feet hit the water...and I didn't feel his hands. I was down, the water rushed over my head and the certainty that the end was near overwhelmed me like the force of the water. And then, I felt his hands. As quickly as I had gone under I was pulled back to the surface and into his arms. In the deep end of danger, I was safe.

And this, my friends, is how I feel about life. There is a deep end, and it beckons with the invitation to adventure. But far more importantly, the deep end offers the opportunity to experience the sufficiency of God to both call us to jump and to catch our full weight when decide to trust Him.

Today I leave for Southeast Asia. No, I'm not scared. What's to be scared of? This is another small opportunity to jump in the deep end and swim around. I'll be out and drying off again in two-ish weeks. This is just a swimming pool. One day, I'll be jumping in the ocean baby, and swimming out to be lost at sea.

And that's enough water-related metaphor for now. Ciao. Peace. Love.

a series of mini-lives

Transformation. How many times can it happen in one lifetime?

People often say things that are wistful and tinged with regret. It is easy to look back and miss what once was. It's easy because time has a way of fading the edges of pain. They say hindsight is 20/20 and in some ways I suppose we are able to look back and get more of a bird's eye view of past life events. Hopefully we dissect the past enough to learn from it once the raw emotion has faded. But I think as a human race we are more inclined to look backwards with sentimentality. The good 'ol days don't really exist, you know. Even Mayberry had its issues.

But I digress. What I meant to say is that I am daily astonished to remember that I live in Virginia. This life is so very different from the one I had anticipated for myself. In fact, when I look back, what I see so far is a series of mini-lives. It's as though I were the same character in a bewildering variety of settings. My life hasn't been that long really. I'm what, a third of the way through an average (American) life-span? But I haven't lived one life, I've lived many. One day we should get a big cup of coffee and talk about our mini-lives together. There are good stories there just waiting to be told.

Perpetual life-change inspires me to see that I am not stuck in one life pattern. I will always be becoming. Each season of life, each set of experiences and relationships, brings out and refines a new element of my character. Sometimes a mini-life is characterized by success. Sometimes it resonates with the theme of failure. But what others see as failure has begun to look like freedom to me. Every failure was birthed out of risk. Fears that are faced are fears that lose their power. Whether we succeed or fail, we grow more free with each attempt to reach outside our predefined lives.

We are all dynamic characters. You can't live any sort of life as a static, one-dimensional archetype. It's just not possible. We're fluid, we rotate in and out of roles, and most of the time we don't see it happening. Yet life has a strange continuity in its diversity. I am who I have always been, but I am also becoming who I was always meant to be, who God created me to be.