From the Rector…
I love the water. The story goes that when I was about three years old, my dad threw me into the Alabama River and said, “She’ll either sink or swim.” I swam. I’m not entirely convinced the story is true, but I cannot remember a time when I didn’t know how to swim—or didn’t want to be in the water.
Summer vacations were spent at my grandparents’ home in Panama City Beach, where my grandfather, Papa Jerry, had been stationed in the Navy for many years. If we weren’t at the beach, I was in the pool in their backyard. Papa Jerry taught me a great deal about water, especially tides and currents. He had been a Frogman in the Navy and later an underwater demolitions expert who trained Navy SEALs.
Whenever we went to the beach, he taught me to watch for currents and to be wary of rip tides. He showed me how to fix a point on the shore and track how far I drifted. If I was caught in a current, he instructed me to swim parallel to the beach until free of it, and only then make my way back in. The biggest mistake, he said, was trying to fight the current—exhaustion, not the water itself, is what so often leads to drowning.
Papa Jerry had a deep respect for the ocean. As a diver, he spent much of his life in a world I can only imagine. At one point, he even held the record for the deepest open-water dive. That respect taught him something essential: the ocean holds both wonder and danger. By understanding the danger, he was able to spend a lifetime beholding the wonder.
I’m not sure we always hold those two truths together. We are taught to fear rip currents—and rightly so—but not to understand them. We worry about sharks or jellyfish and miss their beauty, their place in the created order. (Though, to be fair, I would still prefer not to swim with either.) There is a difference between awareness and fear, and we often collapse the two.
Scripture holds this tension. Water is both destruction and renewal, chaos and calm. It was present at the beginning—untamed and mysterious—and remains so even now. It holds both possibility and threat. Moses divided it, John baptized with it, Jimmy sings about it, and we swim in it.
This past weekend, Steve and I were out on a boat near the pass at Orange Beach. It was a postcard-perfect day—clear blue sky, bright sun, water shimmering in shades of aquamarine blue and sea green. As we watched, two people slid down the slide of a double-decker pontoon boat and were immediately caught in a rip current pulling them out to sea. We went to help, but a jet ski reached them first, tossing a rope and beginning to pull them back. Within minutes, lifeguards arrived and helped them safely back to their boat. Crisis averted.
What began as a beautiful, carefree afternoon could easily have become the lead story on the evening news—not because they did anything wrong, but because we cannot always know the dangers around us. Water, like life, can be like that.
The two caught in the current did the most important thing: they did not panic. They stayed afloat and waited for help. They trusted that someone would come for them. And maybe that is all we can do when we feel threatened.
When the currents of life pull harder than we expect—when fear rises and we feel ourselves being carried somewhere we did not choose—we are so often tempted to fight with everything we have. But faith does not always look like striving. Sometimes it looks like surrender. Sometimes it looks like trusting that we are not alone in the water.
In baptism, we are marked as Christ’s own forever—not promised a life free from dangerous waters, but promised that we will never face them alone. The God who moves over the waters is the same God who meets us in them, who steadies us when we cannot steady ourselves, and who does not let us go.
So when the current catches you, do what you can to stay afloat. Resist the panic. And trust—trust that God is already in the water with you, and that, in ways seen and unseen, help is already on the way.
Light and Life,
Candice+