http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSCQLEzm0nw
My favorite Scottish band Frightened Rabbit has a song on
their third album called “Swim Until You Can’t See Land” and it is an absolute
gem (above is the link). It starts with a faint plucking bass line, a happy little guitar lick and
some tambourine over a pleasant background accordion. As the lyrics start, we
find it is the story of a man making his way to the edge of the ocean and the
edge of his mind. As he begins to dip his toe in he says, “if
I hadn't come now to the coast to disappear, I may have died in a landslide of
rocks and hopes and fears” and later, as he is knee deep, “Let's call me a
Baptist, call this a drowning of the past. She is there on the shoreline
throwing stones at my back” and as the chorus starts for the second time we can
understand it; “Swim, until you can’t see land.” Lead singer and songwriter
Scott Hutchison commented around the time of the album’s release that this was
the first album he had written that was not about a miserable break up. I think
that it is good to leave things behind, although hopefully this does not sound
like a rehashing of what I said last week about being newly single, that has
not been on my mind much this week.
I
put that song on the other night when I was driving home from the library where
I had spent about five hours studying Matthew 6:24-34. I was up to my ears in
thoughts on what it meant to take Jesus seriously when he said, “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of
its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” (Matthew 6:34 NRSV). Do we not
make plans? Do we seize the day so hard that we end it feeling like we have
become the essence of carpe diem? And
what of the fact that we are told that God provides food for the birds though
they do not sow or reap and God provides clothes for the lilies though they do
not spin or toil? Do we not even need to work? The short answer to these
questions is no. As I had already felt and as many commentators explicitly we
have not been granted permission to assume God will do everything for us, we
have been granted permission to say that despite our best efforts, we need God.
Without him, we are so easily consumed by our pasts or our futures that today’s
troubles, which are sufficient in and of themselves, are so easily neglected.
So how can we allow ourselves to have the proper amount of worry about all the
days that are not today?
The
short answer to that question is that I do not know. We cannot simply forget
our past and we cannot waste each day worrying about tomorrow. I like the analogy
of driving a car here; we use our past as a reference point to figure out where
we are yet we do need our eyes primarily focused ahead, but not so far ahead
that we miss the things in the road right in front of us. We have to figure out
what it means to be right here, right now. Part of that process is remembering
that God is with us, right here, right now. Somewhere there are fuzzy lines
where too much retrospection or too much speculation happen.
Right now I am coming
out of a time when I have been spending a bit more time looking in the rearview
mirror and have as a result wanted to do a bit more “swimming” than usual but I
think that’s alright. Now I find myself asking God to help me enjoy the waters
I am in now that I have left the coast behind me.
