Breathing Underwater

The hardships I’ve been through, this past year especially, have felt like falling overboard in the middle of the ocean and plunged into icy depths. The undertow is stronger than my ability to push upwards, and am horrified to find my struggle only takes me deeper and deeper down. My only hope left is God, and without His help I will certainly drown. Maybe you’ve been there too. There are in life those moments that take all the breath from your lungs and all the strength from your body and soul. All the light of day becomes small fragmented beams that dance mockingly on the surface of what pulls you under.

But God is not limited like I am.

He exists in reality outside of my linear thought and outside of the confines of nature itself, since He created it all. If He has plunged me into the depth of the sea He can also put His breath in my lungs so that I can breathe through what should drown me. He can carry me along in the current that pulled me under like a child at rest. Does it make where I am less real, less foreign, less dark? No, but in those places He teaches me what transcends all of this world - Himself.

In the depths He opens my eyes to see wonders under the surface I never would have seen. There are mysteries and a world of beauty that I have never known. I would not have chosen that icy plunge or the fear of what may wait beneath the surface, but I would have missed a magnificent world without it. In both the bright and dark He is Lord, so I learn not to fear where He may lead next. He is the breath in my lungs on land and under the waters, I just know its veracity more acutely when I don’t have the ability to sustain myself. If I depended on my own capabilities and what is possible to my own mind, I’d be crushed by the weight of the water. But since this all-powerful Creator God who created all the molecules that swirl around and within is with me, I have absolutely no reason to fear. He can fill me with breath, heal my wounds, help me endure impossible circumstance (ex. Paul) or give me super-human abilities and insight (ex. Elijah, Peter), so what in life is there really to be afraid of?

Does knowing God, the Creator of the universe, lessen the reality of our pain? Did it lessen the reality of the Lion’s den for Daniel, the intensity of the fiery furnace for Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the darkness and gloom of the prison cell for Paul, or the loneliness of exile for John (or the reality of living through the many ways they tried to kill him)? I think those things were not less real, but that through it they learned a reality more true and more real. Paul described a time like this: “We were completely overwhelmed beyond our ability to endure, and we thought we would never live through it. In fact, we expected to die. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.” (2 Cor. 1:8-9) Our world, even death itself is not lasting. God bids us to see the eternal through our dim glasses of this chronological world of temporalities. We are not owed a safe and unshaken existence. No, God loves us for too much for that. He wants to give us Himself, Himself! Often we cannot see Him because we are staring at our limitations and clinging to the flimsy treasures of this world. So He takes us underwater and opens our eyes to the fact with Him nothing is impossible…even joy in prison, fire that doesn’t scorch, waking on water, breathing underwater…