Awhile back, I had a conversation with a friend of mine from Kentucky. She's a bit rough around the edges, she has a lot of problems- both physically and in life circumstances, and she's just recently been turning her life back over to God. Our conversation began with her telling me some rather interesting experiences and struggles she'd been going through recently. Long story short, she was born premature and, technically, should not be alive. She has numerous health problems, a learning disability (reads at 3rd grade level, math at 2nd), the only people who ever really loved her (her grandparents) have passed away, she was married for 2 years- the first she never saw her husband, the second he beat her. She spent two years addicted to drugs. There was more, but you get the general idea. She talked in length about swimming- apparently she used to be incredibly good and was in line for the Olympics.
MY POINT:
She talked about how she put everything into swimming.. how she would absolutely fly through the water and when she was finished, be so completely exhausted that someone would have to pull her out of the pool. She said, "I put all my hurt, my frustrations, my pain, my bitterness, all the bad stuff that I felt and that had happened to me.. I put it into the water. I put EVERYTHING in the water." I'll be honest, I cried. It wasn't the first time that had happened since we started talking, but this wasn't a cry of heartache, this was because I was so struck by the beauty in her statement and the parallel that it has with baptism and with Christ.
Isn't that what we do? When we come to Christ, when we come to the water, He calls us to put it all in there... all our hurts, our pain, our sins, our burdens, our weaknesses, our past... We bury it, we leave it in the water, and He calls us to a new life. The parallel doesn't stop there.. she said "I put EVERYTHING in the water" and that's what we must do. We must give it all up. We can't hold back from God, we can't leave rooms locked up in our heart, we can't hold on to our secret sins... He wants it ALL so that he can change us, heal us, renew us, love us, shape us, mold us to be more like Him.
And if we don't leave it.. if we don't come back out of the water because we're holding on to something... we'll drown. We'll drown in our anguish, our bitter feelings, our sufferings, our self-pity, our regret. We'll drown and we'll never know what it means to truly live. And it's constant, this leaving our "junk" in the water.. we daily have new struggles, "drama", heartaches to turn over to Christ and trust that He will use us and heal us and change us. Incredible how much her words penetrated my heart and how beautiful the message was that came from her story. Yea God!
I pray that I never hold back anything from God, that I can forever release my grip on my life and leave it in His hands...
