Deeper...Still

I love swimming. Now, I need to mention that for the statement to be entirely true, we’d need to have a long discussion on what ‘swimming’ is, and I suspect you would not agree with me on whether I even know how to swim. Nevertheless, I consider the definition of the word to be broad enough to include sitting in the pool (on shallow end, of course) with the water up to my neck and holding on tightly to the bars. Oh, bliss!

I get very excited about going to the pool – that’s how I know about the love part. And, I always vow before I leave the house that ‘today’, I will swim the entire length. In that particular dream, I’m beautifully and coolly doing my strokes across the pool and all the fairer members of the crowd are standing around gaping and clapping. Needless to say, it’s taking time for that to become a reality.
 

Mind you, I was once quite the fish - sharks have complained about my making them look bad in inter-coral competitions. Then one December evening, in the Tanzanian part of the Indian Ocean, a near-drowning experience abruptly ended my affair with water bodies, and it took me some time to re-ignite it. So you can understand why my steps are tentative, and restricted abut to the edge. I keep telling myself that this time round, I’ll venture out into the deeper parts, but I’m yet to get round to it. Perhaps this year…

I wonder how many of us are like that. Not in the natural swimming pool, but in the one that actually matters – the expansive rivers of God. Oh, we love God, there’s no doubt about that. We get very excited about ‘being’ with Him. And yet, when it’s time to make a commitment, pay a price to make that happen, we’re happy to stay in the shallow end, holding tightly to the ledge. Getting into the depths of God requires work – work that we either don’t have time for, or don’t consider essential, or that we’ve tried before and gave up.

Yet that was never God’s plan! His desire is that we would get as deep into Him as we can, as near to Him as is humanly possible, and then closer still with the help of the Holy Spirit. Paul says, in his letter to the Corinthians, that (paraphrased) No one’s ever seen or heard anything like this, never so much as imagined…what God has arranged for those that love Him…but you’ve seen it and heard it because God by His Spirit has brought it all out into the open before you. The Spirit, not content to flit around on the surface, dives into the depths of God, and brings out what God planned all along.

That stirs something in me. God wants me to dive with His Spirit into the depths and discover Him. The shallower our relationship is, the less I can expect to receive from Him. He gets excited about people that will go after Him – in fact, He gets so excited He begins to reveal His unfathomable self to the seeker. And it is there, in the depths of God, that life in all its fullness is found. It is there that the plan of God for our life with Him is brought out into the open.

I’m giving it a decided go, this diving into the depths of God. As for the other matter, I’m still trying to fix a lunch meeting with one of them Dunfords – let’s see how it goes.