Day 34: Lazy Faith = Spiritual Drowning

For this reason, we must pay attention all the more to what we have heard, so that we will not drift away. Hebrews 2:1

From yours truly, here is some fun Bible trivia you can use, free of charge, to dazzle your friends at the next church potluck. “Drift away” in this verse comes from the Greek word pararreo—line over the “o” giving it a hard “oh” sound. (If your initial thought was, “Oh, kind of like Camero?” you are not alone). This word basically means “slip away” or “flow past,” which comes off a bit innocuous initially, right? Like some teenager sprawled out on an inner tube, floating down a lazy river in a Mountain Dew commercial. However, as I learned one summer a few years ago, floating can actually be much more dangerous than it looks.

I was at the beach, almost asleep in a lounge chair, when I noticed a woman flailing in the surf about fifty or so yards out in the sea. There weren’t any lifeguards on this particular stretch of sand in Northern Florida, so I looked around to see if anyone else was watching, but there were only a handful of other sunbathers around and nobody was paying attention to the screaming chick. So I instinctively jumped up and ran into the waves to retrieve her.

I spent six summers working as a lifeguard in high school and college, and my old training kicked in as I approached her. I spoke calmly and assured her she was going to be okay when I got close enough for her to hear me, then I made a shallow dive underwater, grabbed her by the thighs and turned her body so that I could put her in a cross-chest carry. One of the first things you learn in lifeguard training is never to approach a panicked swimmer directly because their instinct is to grab whoever’s closest around the neck, which is why there are so many double-drowning incidents.

Anyway, after I got her in a floating position on her back with my right arm over her chest, I began stroking with my left arm and scissor-kicking as hard as I could with both legs toward shore. But within a few moments alarm bells began going off in my head because instead of making any forward progress we were quickly getting pulled further and further out to sea.

I asked her to help me kick so that we could make some headway but all she did was mumble incoherently, which is when I smelled the alcohol and realized she reeked of beer. I was probably in the water with that woman for another four or five minutes when it occurred to me that we might not make it. The surf was just so rough, she was such dead weight, and I’d inhaled so much seawater that I started seeing white stars—the way you do just before you faint. It’s the only time in my entire life that I was actually afraid I was going to drown.

I believe it was only the grace of God that gave me the strength to finally drag Ms. Bud Light to the shore where we both collapsed face down in the sand like Tom Hanks in Castaway. By then I was so beat, I decided to head back to the hotel as soon as I was able to hand her off to the party of drunks she’d wandered off from. When the manager saw me walking into the lobby, he asked why I was coming in earlier than usual. After I explained why I was so physically and mentally spent he exclaimed, “Oh Lisa, you’re lucky to be alive because the riptide was so strong today, the Weather Service warned people not to get in the water at all!” He went on to describe soberly how two tourists had already drowned that day only a mile or so up the coast from us. And that’s when I realized why it had been more difficult than usual to swim boozer-babe to safety. The whole time I was trying to move us toward the beach, there was a powerful current—lethally powerful—pulling us in the other direction.

Which is basically the same condition we find ourselves in as followers of Christ. Treading water spiritually is not a viable option. Because if we aren’t intentionally moving toward Jesus, there is a powerful riptide of an enemy actively working to pull us away from Him. There’s no such thing as neutral waters. “Don’t Drift” isn’t an innocuous biblical warning, it’s a flashing red light accompanied by a blaring siren!

• What’s the one thing that most tempts you to drift in your pursuit of the Lord?
• What are you intentionally doing to keep yourself moving toward Jesus instead of drifting away from Him?
• If you are in a season of spiritual drift, who is a solid believer nearby that God may have placed in your life to help you paddle back to shore?