I was swimming along just fine, regularly going for a mile or more, several times a week.  I felt strong and sleeker than usual.  Then, one day, I just didn’t feel like it and had to argue myself into going to the pool.  I felt bloated and stressed and harried, and in my convincing conversation with myself, I reminded me that this is exactly the kind of time when it’s important to go ahead and get moving instead of eating half a cake in front of the TV.  It’s probably a result of watching too much TV and too many movies, but on the first lap I kept waiting to start feeling better.  I’m moving now.  I complied.  Kick in the soaring inspirational montage music and I’ll feel sleekness return.  I’ll be out of the funk.

That’s not what happened.  I don’t remember how long I swam that day – maybe a half mile, if I made it that far – and every single stroke was a struggle.  There was no montage music.  There was no lightening of my load.  I never hit my swimming stride to feel sleek and smooth, gliding through the water.  I felt like I was thrashing around, slapping and splashing, struggling to breathe.

I was praying the whole time.  Praying as I convinced myself to go.  Praying as I got into the pool and started thrashing.  Praying for my stroke to even out.  Praying for God to be with me and lift some of the burden I felt, weighing me down.  I thought I was struggling with myself – with self-doubt and that strangely stultifying combination of physical laziness and overwork – but as I doggedly kept slapping the surface of the water, gasping for each breath, I started to think maybe it wasn’t me.

I started to wonder if I was in a wrestling match with God.  And, since I was in the pool, I also wondered if God was trying to drown me.  That feeling didn’t go away for the entire swim, and I wondered why God would want to wrestle me right then, on a shaky day to begin with, in a particularly vulnerable location.

I love the story of Jacob wrestling all night with the angel/God (Genesis 32: 22-32), refusing to let go or give in until he’d received the blessing he was after.  I love the idea of God as one who’s willing to get this intimate with us in our struggles, but until my own wrestling match I always thought of the wrestling itself as merely a metaphor.  I preferred my actual experiences of God to be in more in the comforting metaphor variety – Good Shepherd, mother hen (John 10: 11-18, Matthew 23:37).

That day in the pool, I was face-to-face, breath-to-struggling-breath, with a very present but not so comforting God.   I don’t know why and I am not sure I know yet what blessing I wrangled that day, but God was definitely present in the pool with me and it wasn’t the comfort I thought it would be when I started swimming and praying.

Months later, when I’d pushed that episode to the back of my mind, it came pouring back to the front during a conversation with my students.  We’d been singing the David Crowder Band song “How He Loves,” which includes this line:  “If grace is an ocean we’re all sinking.”  I told them this doesn’t seem like grace for me, that I like the metaphor of grace as an ocean but it needs language like  “floating” and  “buoyed up” to describe it.  Do we really want grace to sink us?  Isn’t that like being drowned by grace?

Then I remembered my wrestling match.  Maybe Crowder’s got it right after all.  Maybe we do want grace to sink us.  From our watery beginnings in baptism, death for Christians is as present as life.  When we join the tribe, we enter through a “watery grave,” believing it holds the promise of life.  And it does, but we go by the road Christ himself traveled, as Charles Wesley wrote (United Methodist Hymnal, p. 302):  “Soar we now where Christ has led, Alleluia!/ Following our exalted head, Alleluia!/ Made like him, like him we rise, Alleluia!/ Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!”

I don’t know why I thought God would stand back in my vulnerable moment instead of jumping in with me.  I don’t know why I thought metaphors were enough.  Don’t get me wrong:  I don’t want a rematch, at least not in the pool.  But maybe part of the blessing I received that day was the experience itself, of being taken hold of by God in a desperate and vulnerable moment, and being held onto no matter how I struggled and resisted, no matter how much I begged for a mother hen instead of an underwater sumo wrestler.