swim good

I had a dream I was swimming in the ocean. The water was vast and beautiful, clear and calm, and I was at peace. I remembered I’d dropped something in the water and swam below the surface to get it. As I swam, I didn’t feel the sensation of holding my breath. The deeper I went into the water, the more I felt okay. There was nothing else here. Just me.

Down I went until I saw what I’d dropped; a 35mm camera with a leather strap that was sitting atop a colourful reef. I grabbed it and turned around to swim back to the surface. I noticed I was much deeper in the water than I’d thought, but it didn’t concern me. I was at peace, and I swam back to the surface in peace —  still not feeling the sensation of holding my breath. But, when I got to the surface of the water, my peace turned into anxiousness.

I saw a manta ray swimming toward me. This once empty water now showed life, and this guest of mine wasn’t expected or invited. I immediately thought to myself that I would die if it got near me, so I frantically tried to swim away. I didn’t realize it was trying to swim underneath me to help me. I didn’t remember that their tails are harmless, just like they are. None of this came to mind until after I woke up.

I believe, especially because of the relationship God has with me, that His love is vast and deep like the ocean. It stretches and carries, it’s discoverable and almost unsearchable. So, there’s a prayer I pray concerning God’s love. It’s never a request or question, just an expression and statement. “I want to swim in the ocean of your love and believe that nothing here can harm me.”

Days prior to having this dream, I found myself in prayer about the love of God and swimming in that ocean. I explored the spectrum of thoughts about the ocean’s mystery and terror. I have a whole heart’s desire to swim freely in the depth and vastness of God’s love all of my life, but sometimes I can imagine monsters in this safe place and it no longer feels safe. I continually repeated how much I just wanted to believe that there was nothing in the water to harm me because I know that God’s only thoughts and His love toward me is always kind, compassionate, and caring. No harm can come upon me in His presence, I know it because the Bible says so. But up until that point, I don’t think I fully believed it.

Could you imagine? Understanding God’s great love for you but finding it hard to believe because of the great mystery about it? If we want to consider the ocean as a comparison, we as human beings have only discovered and explored 10% of it. There’s another 90% undiscovered and unaccounted for. Mystery — the mystery of the ocean and mystery in God’s love, to me, is similar. That mystery frightened me because it requires me to do what I hadn’t been the most comfortable with doing in a long time: trusting.m, especially in what I don’t know or see.

I could trust more in what I knew and saw than in the One who knows all and sees all. No matter how nearsighted and fragmented my foresight was, I held dearly to it as the end-all-be-all truth. But the Truth was always there, telling me I needed to lead with I don’t know and trust God. Trust His great love for me. Trust that the other shoe doesn’t drop. Trust that His promises and will are good. Trust that God is faithful to show up for me in a way that’s loving, kind, and perfect because He is.

Eventually, though, I made the decision that I just wanted to trust Him. I just wanted to go with Him in the boat. I was tired of retreating and trying to go back out of fear. Instead, I wanted to face the fear… and it was in that decision (and after some really impactful experiences with friends) that a revelation came. God shared something so thoughtful, compassionate, and kind about Himself with me.