...held like sea water

O the deep, deep love of Jesus, vast, unmeasured, boundless, free,

rolling as a mighty ocean in its fullness over me!

Underneath me, all around me is the current of his love,

leading onward, leading homeward to that glorious rest above.

---Samuel Trevor Francis, 1898

Many of us are familiar with President John Kennedy’s quote concerning his deep passion for the sea – “We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea – whether it is to sail or to watch it – we are going back from whence we came.” Kennedy was famously at home in the frigid waters of his beloved Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, where in times of health and illness the water seemed life-giving and restorative.

The man I saw most in love with the sea was my father. Each summer we would camp (you read that right --- camping at the beach in the summer!) for a week or so, in the heat and humidity. And I would watch my professor father with the perpetual farmer tan float for hours on his back in the briny Gulf water, not paddling, not kicking, not moving at all. He’d tell my brother and me, “This salty water will hold you up. You just have to relax and lie back.” It was a matter of trust, and giving up the need to control the water that supported you.

You know, I never got as good at it as my dad; I never could float for hours, relaxed and committed to the water’s ability to hold me. But for a minute or two, here and there, it sometimes worked. I sometimes let go. And when I trusted that the sea was more capable than I, more powerful than I, more boundless than I’d ever be to meet my need to be held up --- for that moment, I was free.

Oh, to trust that I would be held up like that.