When it comes to exercise, I’d prefer to be a landlubber. Water sports really aren’t my thing. But as the Rolling Stones reminded us back in the ’60s, you can’t always get what you want, so most of my exercising these days is done in a swimming pool.
I’m not talking about lounging in a floating chair with a cold drink in my cupholder. Oh, no. I’m talking about chugging up and down the pool with my 50-something body stuffed into a Speedo tanksuit. (I even have a Speedo goggles and a Nike swim cap. Accessorize, accessorize.)
As I have mentioned before, my aching body has at least temporarily doomed me to what feels like exercise purgatory: swimming laps in the YMCA pool. I am a stranger in a strange land.
But not everything is different in waterworld. I’m discovering that just like out in the gym, exercisers in the pool run the gamut. You’ve got your noodle-toting folks in the arthritis exercise class, your tri-athletes putting in their hard yards in the lap lanes, and us tweeners who split the difference.
There are swimmers who glide effortlessly up and down the pool as if they were born with fins and gills; and those of us who know that God made fish to swim, and people to play tennis and golf.
I learned to swim when I was very young, but I’m pretty sure I don’t exactly glide through the water. I would love to be a long, lanky glider, but I’m not.
I read a book about swimming that says it’s all a matter of rolling your body from side to side, reaching forward with each stroke, and then holding that stretch for just a moment longer than feels normal. That, they say, is how one can glide through the water like an arrow.
So, that’s what I do. As I swim up and down, up and down my lane, I stretch, reach forward and pretend I look like Michael Phelps. Some imagination, huh?
One important key to sustaining this delusion, and the confidence and motivation it provides, is this: I try not to compare myself to the people swimming in the lanes beside me, especially if they are genuine, bona fide, seasoned lap swimmers—you know, gliders. If I don’t curb that urge, my competitive juices start flowing and pretty soon I’m out of synch and out of breath, and it all becomes quite miserable.
I hate it when I do that. It’s so much better for me to just roll, reach, and stretch my way down my own lane, at my own pace.
Quite a life lesson there.
God has given each of us gifts, abilities, and a rhythm that is uniquely our own. Some of us are gliders, some of us are chuggers.
Both are okay, as long as we are moving forward, growing, and faithfully using our gifts to do whatever God has called us to do.
I can’t be you and you can’t be me, but mercy, how we do try sometimes.
I look over there at you in your lane, looking so sleek, lanky, competent and fast, and I feel compelled to try to do things the way you do them. And it darn near kills me.
The truth? The world needs us both; the church needs us both.
“Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are varieties of ministries, and the same Lord. There are varieties of effects, but the same God who works all things in all persons. But to each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” (1 Corinthians 12:4-7)