Originally published in Houston Baptist University's Corners in October 2016.
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On the brink of death, all he can think about is that he doesn’t know how to swim.
With his arms crossed over his chest, bound and unable to move, he’s in the perfect helpless position to contemplate his entire life. Below, his feet hang over open waters. The ocean is calm today, but even then, he knows he’ll drown once he goes down.
He’s afraid. His parents have always been too busy with their jobs to teach him how to swim, and by the time he found a second home, he was too old to ask for lessons. Figured it would never matter. Well, it certainly would come in handy now.
The chains crisscrossing his body are starting to dig into his skin. This is a treatment that almost everyone he knows has gone through, but he never thought death would be this nerve-wracking. It’s a bit too late to have second thoughts since he’s already tied up.
Regardless, he’s having second thoughts.
He’s never been a model child, and it’s a blessing (or, maybe, it’s a curse) that his parents are still proud of him even if his grades are horrible for lack of trying. Motivation is a hard thing to come by for him. What if that doesn’t change after this? He peers into his future and sees a string of constant dismissals from minimum wage jobs. Because he’s never been smart enough. Never been good enough. Never had a talented bone in his body, save for his wisecracking mouth. Sarcasm isn’t going to last him long when he’s all grown up, though.
It’s true what people say about seeing their lives flash before their eyes right before dying.
Snapshots flash through his mind.
His life before: getting detention more times than he can count. Being so bad at everything that he can’t even win a game of Go Fish because he gives all of his cards away. Being the class clown because he can’t stand out in any other way. It’s shallow, but he’s always wanted to be special. To be an individual, to stand out amongst the crowd. It’s not enough that he’s the only child his parents took under their wing. It’s not enough that he’s dating a girl who looks at him like he’s her moon and stars.
His life before: finding out he was adopted and pretending like it didn’t utterly devastate him to save his parents some pain. It hangs over his shoulders – ironically enough – like an anchor, crushing him beneath its weight. If the people who were supposed to love him more than anything else in the world didn’t want him, then who would? That is where the whole “like a mother loves her child” phrase comes from, after all, isn’t it? Well, his mother loved him enough to leave him in “better hands” and then never come back. How endearing.
His life after: an unknown. A big blank slate.
The anchor he’s chained to shifts, jolting him from his thoughts. Above, he hears the echo of the captain barking out orders to lower him into the waters. His heart beats so hard it might as well burst out of his chest. He expects the descent to be slow, given the chains and pulleys and whatever else goes into dropping an anchor, but it’s jarringly fast.
The curved head of the anchor slams into the water first, and then his feet follow. Within seconds, he’s submerged and panicking. A self-preservation instinct that he didn’t even know he had kicks in, and he begins struggling harder than ever before in his life. The chains around him refuse to budge, though. He’ll give the crew this – they really know how to tie someone down. With his arms tied over his chest and his ankles bound together, he can’t quite wiggle out of his predicament. So, he sinks.
His eyes are closed because he knows opening them would hurt even worse. The water is freezing cold, and he wonders if he’ll die first from holding his breath in or pneumonia. The chain is still going – maybe he’ll die from impact with the ocean floor.
Resisting is useless, so he gives up. There’s no way he can break out of these chains by himself.
When he loses tension in his body and relaxes is when it happens. A warmth creeps up from his toes, and even with his eyes closed, he can see a brightness work its way into his field of vision. He opens his eyes to look – and immediately closes them. The light is so bright that it’s absolutely blinding. But without looking, he can still tell that it’s getting closer to him. He knows this light. Its warmth is achingly familiar like all of the good things in the world clumped into one essence. A hug from his parents. A kiss from his girlfriend. School being cancelled because of an abrupt snow day. His girlfriend letting him win in a game of Battleship.
He risks a peek and opens his eyes briefly to see what the light is doing. It touches his chains, and they shatter. Just like that. Not being tied to the anchor certainly helps, but he begins to drown, nonetheless, uselessly flailing his arms and legs in an attempt to swim back to the surface. He’s too far down to come back, even if the shadow of the ship’s underbelly is still in view.
But, that’s why the light is here. It envelopes him, and for a brief instant, all he sees is stars in his vision before it’s gone. A voice rings in his ears. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
Then, it’s just him and the ocean. Him and the ocean… and a warmth that sets his heart on fire. If he could cry underwater, he would. Or maybe he already is. It’s overwhelming, how light he feels on the inside. His heart is like a feather, and his shoulders are free. It gives him strength and, suddenly, he knows all of the motions to go through to swim back to the surface. The light has made him buoyant. With it inside of him, he knows one thing: he isn’t dying today.
When he breaks the surface, he collapses in his pastor’s arms, his feet almost slipping on the bottom of the pool. He opens his eyes, and the first thing he sees is the sun shining in the sky. His pastor’s voice in his ears is a rallying cry for the cheering crowd, “Buried alongside Jesus and born again in Him!” A grin forms on his face, and he wipes at his eyes. Maybe it’s the water from the pool. Maybe it’s tears of joy.
The crowd – his church and visitors – is gathered around the small, plastic pool in the middle of a parking lot, but when he looks at them, the first eyes he seeks out are his parents and his girlfriend. There’s nothing but joy and love and pride for him on their faces and in their smiles.
Someone hands him a towel as he’s helped out of the pool, and his girlfriend is the first to give him a bone-crushing hug. “How do you feel?” she asks when they pull apart.
It takes him a moment to form the words. “I feel…” He trails off for a second and glances at the sun in the sky. The brightest thing to ever shine. Its heat bearing down on all of them in the parking lot reminds him of the warmth he felt underwater, despite the coldness of the swimming pool. “Alive.” he finishes, nodding, satisfied with his word choice. It’s not quite enough to describe how he’s buzzing with the energy of Christ inside of him, but it’ll do for now.
On the car ride home, he sits in the back while his parents drive and holds hands with his girlfriend, still grinning ear to ear. He looks out the window at passing cars and stores and sees his life before his eyes again in snapshots.
His life before: dead in sin, in anger, in shame. Feeling like he would forever be unwanted because of choices his biological parents made that he had absolutely no control over. Fearing that everyone would abandon him for the same reasons he was handed off to his mother’s sister – because he was a burden.
His life after: alive in Christ. Unknown but filled to the brim with possibilities. He still had no idea what he would do after high school and college were over, but none of that mattered so much anymore. All he needed to know was that he wasn’t alone in life, and never would be again.