5-8-26 - Swimming In Love

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

Language fails when we try to convey the overlapping unity of love and persons in God, a triune swirl of inter-relatedness in which we are invited to swim. Jesus, at least as his remarks are rendered in John’s Gospel, seemed to have almost as much trouble making it clear: “In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”

Where does Jesus end and the Father begin? Where do we end and Jesus begin? Are we in the Father and in Jesus, or vice versa, or (g) all of the above? The answer is (g)… and maybe (z). God is love. Jesus is love. We love and are loved, and so are drawn into the eternal and present Love of God.

When two people fall in love, there can be a period where identities merge. We want to fuse, to lose ourselves in the glorious other, whose every word and movement is wondrous. This stage of in-love-ness is intoxicating – and it’s not forever. If the relationship is to grow and strengthen, we need to differentiate again, to carry our own identities, loving and respecting the other person, being with but not needing to be one with.

Does Jesus suggest we lose our identity when we let the love of God become a part of us, and we of God? I don’t think so. The Christian tradition celebrates that each of us is unique and precious. Our self does not get obliterated as we enter the stream of God’s love. Rather, being loved for who we are allows us to become more fully who we truly are, shedding the inauthentic carapaces and personas we grow to protect ourselves and cope with adversity.

We don’t lose ourselves swimming in God’s love any more than we do when we swim in the vast, refreshing ocean. We become more fully alive. We are contained in our bodies, and yet somehow one with a primal element. We exult as we move in that unbounded water, which allows us to dive and dance and turn somersaults and ride waves, all kinds of things we can’t do on land, just as dwelling in God's love enables us to do and think and say and offer all kinds of things we can’t in our natural selves.

Today in prayer let's go swimming. Imagine a waterfall flowing into the sea. Let’s say the sea is the Love of God, the waterfall is Jesus, and the spray that rises as they meet is the Holy Spirit. This sea is always being renewed, refreshed, replenished, the water all one, so you cannot distinguish sea from waterfall from spray. Imagine jumping in. How does the water feel? How does it make you feel? How do you want to move in it?

• If this is God’s love, how does it feel to be immersed in love? 
• How would you share the water with others? 
• How would you invite others to join you in that pool? 

Swimming in the love of God allows us to access the source of Love that has no limit, so that we love out of the reservoir of God’s infinite love, not our own limited supply. As we approach the summer “swimming season,” I hope you’ll have lots of opportunities to be reminded of the water, the love, in which we were reborn, in which we will swim always. Splash!

© Kate Heichler, 2026. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for next Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.

7-30-21 - Swimming To Jesus

For the next few weeks, we will have a worship series at the Christ Churches on Summer Pastimes and how they speak to us of the life of faith. Each Friday I will turn from the lectionary gospel to the one I’ve selected for worship at my churches - this week John 21:3-7. You can listen to this reflection here.

The summer pastime we will explore at the Christ Churches this Sunday is swimming. Swimming is one of my very favorite summer pastimes – especially going into the ocean on a hot day, feeling the rush of cold, cold water, being lifted and dropped by the swell, lost in the vastness of water. I may feel the most free in the ocean, but lakes, ponds, even swimming pools will do just fine.

The Christian life is water-life. We begin our God-Life in the waters of baptism and are sustained by the living water welling up inside us for eternity which Jesus said was Holy Spirit. The prophet Ezekiel wrote of a vision he was shown of a river flowing from the altar of the temple, a flow which gradually got deeper until it was “deep enough to swim in,” a river that brought life to the stagnant places. These images and others have given me the notion of the “healing stream” which flows in and through each of us, and around us, into which we can step for renewal and repair. Jesus likened the Holy Spirit to the river of God – we literally jump into the Spirit-life and let it heal and carry us instead of trying to make it all happen ourselves.

Our gospel story this Sunday reminds us that we move through water to get to Jesus, as Peter hops out of the fishing boat (taking care to put on clothes before he gets wet…) to swim to shore when he realizes the resurrected Jesus stands on the beach. It’s not the first time Peter hops out of a boat to get to Jesus – the first time is when he sees Jesus walking on the water and decides to join him, which he does for a few moments until he realizes what he’s doing and begins to sink. This time, he swims. What if we thought of the life of faith as swimming to Jesus, who awaits us with breakfast on the beach? Isn’t that much more fun than our often dry and dusty church patterns?

As followers of Christ, we are invited to jump into the baptismal waters and swim, taking the risk of getting out of the boat and into the freedom and the danger of water-life. The boat might be a symbol for the church – that place from which we jump, to which we return to regroup. Maybe part of the reason our churches don’t have the vitality they might is that we are spending too much time in the boat with each other, and not enough in the water.

I can beat a metaphor to death better than anyone I know (and this Summer Pastimes series offers me lots of fodder!), so I will stop there, and simply invite you to think of living the life of faith as jumping into cool, refreshing water and swimming, entirely surrounded and supported by the water’s density, and yet also having to move forward in it to avoid sinking. We are held in the life of God, cleansed, refreshed and renewed, and yet we also propel ourselves forward in that life. We have no life apart from God – and total freedom to swim in that life for eternity.

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