Several years ago I thought I might give effort to adding swimming to my fitness aspirations. I watched from afar as my sister enjoyed a repeated offering of a t-shirt prize for a few sprint triathlons and I have a thing about t-shirts; I figured swimming would be the least expensive addition to my running repertoire, I could consider cycling once I made some considerable gains in the pool and then I'd be two-thirds on my way to that t-shirt and all the pride that went along with it.
Because I was married and we didn't have any babies yet I had all the time in the world to dream a little and run a lot. Now the pool would become a new road to conquer. We lived off post but Fort Bragg had (at the time) a bunch of pools that needed someone to swim their long, lonely lanes. In those days all the boys were deployed and our little Bragg was a bit of a ghost town. So I asked my sister for a plan and she was quick to share and I was set to swim all the laps. I quickly learned, however, that because one has a pool and a plan doesn't mean that one can swim. It seemed to me that I could make my body go where it was supposed to, but I couldn't breathe. I couldn't figure it out: I had the energy, I had the stamina, but about a yard from the edge at every lap's end I felt nearly a panic of lungs that were full from inspiration and I couldn't find the space in the stroke to give toward the expiration of it all, everything that was built up.
This is how I feel about writing. My head and heart fill nearly at the regular with words, especially in the shower where I feel trapped to try and hold the words in my mind's eye until I can get them down, but then I sit in front of a screen or a notebook and the words are stuck. It's like that breath I don't know what to do with in the pool; the words swim around madly and I panic.
It seems, like swimming, there's a need for conditioning differently than what I knew in running. In all my years of running, my body knows exactly what to do; I know my breaths based on my footfall, I know the muscles that fire for the hills and how to align my arms for efficiency. I've run at night on lonely streets, before dawn on long highways in the countryside, through city streets, in the deep snow, rain, and on long, hot afternoons. I know what do with my lungs to get the air in deep and then how to use that air to really breathe while I run. I suppose this is how I am with talking. I know how to access my emotions to find the words to share a story; I know how to quiet my heart to listen and feel what others are sharing. Talking about the hard is never as hard for me as it was to live the hard; I've learned how to find what I feel deep and use that to make words come together in connecting with others. Writing, however, finds me full of the words but unable to know what to do with them.
And so I'm here to condition that weakness to turn it into to a strength. I have never yet completed a triathlon (notice the yet, I'm not willing to concede a defeat here. I still want that t-shirt.), but I have gotten better at swimming. I now know there's a bit of a difference in the way runners and swimmers utilize their breath. In the same way I wanted to swim, I want to write. Well, I don't really want a t-shirt for writing, although if they had my size I'd probably wear one. But I want to take what I've been given and see what the Lord can do with it; I've been given broken, a good gift from a good God meant to lead me to Him, over and over. I suspect that we've all been given broken in one form or another and sometimes it's like my breath in the pool: we don't know what to do with it and it ends up making us feel like we're meant to drown. But I think we can explore the hard, broken things, and find out they're meant to lead us to inexhaustible hope and inexpressible joy. I pray you might join me.