Riptide

     Do you ever wonder how you wake up in the morning and recall an event from the past? This topic I had not thought about for years and years. I am trying to pull the details from my memosphere, but it is that place in your brain that you try to access and seems to be out of your reach. Anyway I took some friends to the Oregon beach. It was somewhere around the end of my senior year of high school into my first year in college; that was when my car actually worked. I think everyone was sunning themselves in the dunes and I went out to the beach. Walking alone along the beach, I decided to take a swim. In hindsight, my thinking was dumber than a box of rocks, but at the time seemed like a good idea. I was challenged by swimming past the oncoming waves into the ocean so I kept swimming further out into the sea. Perhaps my fearlessness exceeded my common sense.  I suspect I was slightly autistic; they call it Asperger’s. I took the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory a few years ago and one of the supposed negative traits was a lack of fear. I tried to research if I had Asperger’s. A psychologist told me there is no way to determine it at my age, because people tend to compensate and adjust by their 30s. That’s another story; somebody keep me focused…Swimming on my back, I felt a force pull me. By the time I turned over, I realized the force was dragging me out to sea. I was in the riptide.

     Fortunately, I knew what to do. Work with me people. This was Oregon; this subject does not come up in Colorado-more on the lines of hailstorms any month of the year, flash floods, and avalanches. Our natural instinct is to swim against the tide to shore. This is meaningless and will only end up exhausting the swimmer and you will eventually drown. I began to swim at an angle away from shore and into the ocean. A couple of times I looked back at the diminishing shoreline; it was an eerie feeling, but I was not afraid. Eventually a riptide will fan out and dissipate. Then I looked back to shore and went “whoa”. I have never been that far out in an ocean without a mode of transportation. Fortunately, I was a good swimmer so I made my way back to shore. When I stood up on the beach, it was so reassuring to be on solid ground and the warmth was great. Stay with me folks, the water is cold in Oregon, not like Louisiana or Texas where I preferred staying in the water for hours and turning into a prune. I had goosebumps all over my body. I was safe.

Now let’s see if I can draw this analogy. There seemed like a direction so right. Naturally I should try to fight the force of the riptide and swim back to shore. What seemed so right was so wrong. That thinking would lead to death. I had to turn around and take a different direction. The path involved a detour, but the end was a solid foundation and warmth. In this scenario the ocean represents life with potential dangers. Eventually something could happen to end your way of life. Think about your own life. Are you on a path that seems so right, but is so wrong? You have to turn and go a different direction. For me the riptide represents the force of evil that pulls us in a direction we really do not want to go. I had to turn around and by faith take a different action than my natural instincts. For me, the beach represents the solid ground of faith in Christ and the sun’s warmth is the comfort and guidance of the Holy Spirit.

     The moral of the story: Examine your life and stay away from something that can pull you into a riptide. If you find yourself in a riptide, turn another direction and swim away by faith and you will reach the safety of the shore.