Do you remember the first time you went swimming without a life vest? Maybe you do, or maybe you do not. In either case, I think you can imagine your younger self facing an onslaught of H2O molecules that the bathtub did not prepare you for. You may have felt courageous, you may have felt indifferent, or you may have felt terrified. What did it matter though? You still had to face it, whether that was through jumping in wholeheartedly, gradually climbing down the stairs, or being thrown in. It didn’t matter how you felt about the situation; you still had to swim good.
“SOMETIMES FIGHTING MEANS TAKING A DEEP BREATH, AND FINDING HOPE AND REST IN EACH DAY.”
In the same way, many of life’s situations do not care about how we feel about them. When our internet crashes in the middle of a quiz (yes, this just recently happened to me), it really does no good to think “why me?” Instead, what will help is emailing your professor and telling them about the situation. Maybe the situation is much more severe than this, such as a divorce, or facing unemployment. Regrettably, in this fallen world, indescribably awful circumstances are all around us. In the midst of such circumstances, all we can really do is choose to swim good. It will not be like this in eternity, but in this life, we have to fight every day to hold onto the things which are truly important (Galatians 5:22-23). Fighting does not always mean working non-stop in every circumstance. Sometimes fighting means taking a deep breath, and finding hope and rest in each day.
Think of a weightlifter who is trying for a new personal record on his bench press maxiumum weight lifted. What if he is the only one in the gym, and the bar gets stuck on his chest? At that point, there really is no choice; the bar has to come up by any means necessary, whether by lifting it in a bout of God-given strength and determination, or sliding the weight off of the sides. At the point when the bar is stuck, the weightlifter has no choice but to swim good in the deep end.
While life itself in a fallen world, or even the people around you may not care about you or your situation, we have a God who does (1 Peter 5:7, and Romans 8:38-39, and Acts 17:27). We may find ourselves in the deep end sometimes. Accordingly, we have to fight the natural inclination to say “why me?” and instead choose to swim good, knowing that God is the one who keeps us afloat (Isaiah 40:28-29). ><>
