I walked slowly to the water, drawn to it’s soft bubbling murmur, the whispering hum of the waves lapping at the shore. I was shaking and I was uncertain. I was many, many things and few of them good and few of them finite and few of them truth at the time. But I had You and You had me. And there was peace in me I had never known before.
I placed my hands in. The water was cool and it was calm. Quiet, like a sleeping child. Like my soul. Like my inside of me for the first time. I pulled the water up and watched it slide and drip through my fingers. My hands shone with the wet gemstones of water, still trembling slightly. I stared at them, unsettled by my lack of government of them. I did not make them shake… and I could not make them stop. In my mind, I remembered why they shook, and to my eyes they became suddenly stained again.
I knelt at the water again and went to thrust them in to wash them clean of my imagination.
“They are already clean,” He said.
I stopped, my fingertips prisoner on the water’s surface and not quite submerged.
“But they are shaking,” I said.
“You will have to teach them to stop,” He said.
I stared at the quiet before me and how vast and how soundless and how deep it was. The water, so pure and pristine as it waited. In the depth before me that sang in its stillness to my Creator, I found a similarity. There was a peace here, akin to a peace I had found inside of me. A peace that was given to me in my mind and in my soul. I could feel my identity and my person no longer in distress or distant or demonized and just quiet. Like the water. Like me. I could just be me forever, for once.
I scooped the water up into my hand, it was warm; and I waded in without thinking another thought.
And the silence when you are submerged in water is pervasive and every thought echoes a thousand times in the distance between your ears. Fears grow ten times and faith blossoms to mountain movers, depending on which voice is louder. You have no interaction, you have no attention, you have little sensation other than your body slipping as aerodynamically as possible through the surrounding tides. You wish to leave as little disturbance as possible, but rather to glide into the space before you. One pull, one stroke, one moment at a time.
And the moment becomes a minute, becomes an hour, becomes hours. And if you have voices, you have long ago lost yourself to them. Otherwise, you have you. And Him. Him and you together. That’s all.
I reached the other side and pulled myself out of the water, walking crippled, tired and every muscle humming with warmth from exertion. I could feel my entire being stronger, in a way I could not quantify, than when I left the other side.
“How long does it take to swim 8 miles?” He asked.
“6 hours?” I replied, feeling it a trick question.
“It took you about four months,” He said.
I stood there next to Him, looking back at the months I had left behind, pondering. What was that? It wasn’t to get the attention, I didn’t expect any attention! I wasn’t trying to find some way to earn merit or to be good enough. I was just enjoying myself.
I was enjoying my self. I was enjoying me. My thoughts. My soul. My spirit. I was enjoying me.
“This is my about face,” I said to Him and to myself, looking back at the water. “I turned away from what I was. I turned around. And I became somebody entirely new. Somebody I respect. Somebody I like. And I did something to mark Your change in me. Something loud enough, something big enough that people could look and see Your glory in me. And as I turn another year older, I will look back at this – not as the hard or lost or troubled year - but as my about face.”
I smiled, tears in my eyes as I knelt by the water. I scooped some into my hand and watched it glide through my fingers. I stared at my hand, poised quietly. It stayed still, waiting patiently to be told to move.
“Thank you, Yahweh,” I whispered. “Just, thank you.”