When the Canoe Overturns - October 16, 2016

Every year in June, the church I served in Maine goes canoeing for a day
down the Saco River. I came to love this trip and miss it every spring, but I didn’t
always look forward to it with pleasure. In the pictures taken in my first year in
Saco, I’m easy to pick out. I’m the one in the life jacket.

Seeing me so apprehensive, my congregation assumed I couldn’t swim.
But in fact I swim just fine and I like the water – once I get wet. What makes me
anxious is not the water itself, but the prospect of capsizing into it. I don’t like the
idea of being thrown from one state into another, from air to water, from dry to wet.
I don’t like sudden change, change out of my control, change unprepared for. And if
wearing a life jacket and barely daring to move could keep the canoe – and me –
upright and balanced, then I was going to do just that.

As the trip went on and we didn’t tip, I relaxed, took off my life jacket,
moved a little. But just because I grew to like being in the canoe doesn’t mean that
I liked any better the prospect of tipping out of it.

As I fear the change of falling from a canoe into the waters, so do I fear
other changes, which often seem like small deaths.  Continue reading...