God’s help in the ocean

by Christianne Foster Lupher
from The Christian Science Journal, March 2023

In my senior year of college, my husband and I went to the Florida Keys for Labor Day weekend and decided to go scuba diving, just renting tanks and a boat and heading out on our own.

It was a beautiful day with a blue sky and puffy clouds, but there was a good bit of wind and six-foot waves. We motored out to where we thought the edge of the reef was, cut the engine, dropped the anchor in the sand, and made sure it was set. Since the water was murky, we decided to descend down the anchor line. I remember seeing the line above the water and reaching for it as we began to descend, but at the exact moment I went under the surface, it disappeared and my hand closed on nothing. We were in only about thirty feet of water, so I figured we’d see the anchor when we got below the waves and the water cleared.

When we reached the bottom, we looked for the anchor but couldn’t find it. My husband signaled to go up, and when we reached the surface, the boat was nowhere in sight. I immediately found myself struggling with a profound sense of fear. We could see nothing but water towering above us on both sides, except for the brief moments when we reached the crest of each wave. Then for just that moment we could see the boat, which was surprisingly far away considering how short a time it had been since I had reached for that anchor line. We were about three miles offshore, and that was also visible at the crest of each wave, but I had no idea if we could swim that far. Moreover, if we were caught in a current, we would have to swim faster than the current to make it to shore, in which case we might exhaust ourselves and get swept out
to sea.

My husband was much calmer than I and decided that since we were responsible for the boat, we should swim for that and try to catch it. So, we started, but I quickly felt hopeless. We were crawling through the water, unable to see anything except more water, so it felt as if there was no progress. Whenever we did reach the top of a wave, we had to pause in our swimming to look for the boat. It was farther away each time we stopped because the wind was pushing it faster than we could swim.

I was on the verge of panic. I’d never really known what panic was before, but surrounded by ocean, I felt that if I didn’t keep complete control of my thought, I might end up screaming and thrashing in the water. That terrified me more than anything else—the sense that I was about to lose control.

I immediately started praying, but it was a challenge because I didn’t seem to be able to think clearly. Two ideas came to me, though, and I held to them. The first was a half-remembered quote from Adam Dickey’s Journalarticle “God’s Law of Adjustment” (January 1, 1916): “If a man were drowning in mid-ocean with apparently no human help at hand, there is a law of God which, when rightly appealed to, would bring about his rescue.”

The second thought was a few words of what Paul said to the Greeks in Athens: “He [God] giveth to all life, and breath, and all things” (Acts 17:25).

At one point we passed a stationary buoy, and I suggested we swim to it and hold on till someone came by in a boat. This might take days for all we knew, but at least we wouldn’t be swept away in a current. However, my husband had a very strong sense that the right thing to do was to swim for the boat because we were responsible for it. I swam the crawl stroke because it was the most efficient, but the unremitting walls of gray waves were so dispiriting that I sometimes flipped over and did a backstroke so that I could see the blue sky.

I remember thinking how out of place it seemed that I was utterly filled with terror, yet here was this glorious, calm expression of God’s beauty and harmony above us. I clung to it as an expression of God’s presence and just kept reminding myself that “He giveth to all life, and breath, and all things.”

Finally, at the top of one wave, we could see that the boat had changed position. It had swung around with its bow toward us, so we knew the anchor had finally caught. We kept swimming, and now every time we paused to look, the boat was a little bigger. There was no guarantee that it wouldn’t come loose again and drift away before we reached it, so I kept turning to the promise that there’s a law of God that can rescue even a man lost in the ocean.

The boat did stay put, and we finally grabbed the anchor line and pulled ourselves onboard. I was unspeakably grateful. And in the years since, as the challenges of work and marriage and parenthood have arisen, I’ve been especially grateful to have had this demonstration. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble” (Psalms 46:1). No matter how hopeless a situation looks, it is never out of the reach of God’s care.

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This article was published in the March 2023 issue of The Christian Science Journal. To learn more about this monthly magazine, published online and in print, visit HERE.