Just Keep Swimming

In Athens, the apostle Paul responded to the people’s worship of “an unknown god” by declaring, “[God] is not far from any one of us.  ‘For in him we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:23, 27-28). Do you ever feel like God is far away? 

In the Pixar movie Finding Nemo, a clown fish named Marlin living in the Great Barrier Reef loses his son, Nemo.  After Nemo ventures into the open sea, despite his father's constant warnings about the many dangers of the ocean, Nemo is abducted by a boat, netted up, and sent to a dentist's office in Sydney.
 So, while Marlin ventures off to try to retrieve Nemo, Marlin meets a fish named Dory, a blue tang suffering from short-term memory loss.  Often feeling overwhelmed and alone, Dory chants to herself, “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming.” 

               Dory was onto something in coping with her feelings of aloneness.  Sometimes we lose sight of the Lord and His plans for our lives, but we must press on as He continues to draw us near. 

Diana Butler Bass asked “If the water is invisible to the fish, is God, as the One whom we swim, also invisible?”  When we feel alone and can’t see God, it’s not that he doesn’t exist or can’t be known; rather, he surrounds us so closely that sometimes we miss the fact that God is the Living Water in which we swim.  Sometimes we need to just keep swimming until we become aware of that again.

When things get hard and we lose sight of where we are heading, we just need to keep swimming, keep seeking, and keep serving. For in Him we live and move and have our being.

Just keep swimming