Swim Until You Can't See Land

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.