Psalm 18:17 He reached down from on high and grasped me; he drew me out of great waters.
Even now, more than fifteen years after it happened, I can feel the suffocating weight of water pressing me down and down, robbing me of air. “So this is what it’s like to die,” I remember thinking. Then a voice somewhere inside my head told me to quit trying to hold on to the tree I could barely reach, to let go and let the current carry me away. And so I did.
I popped up somewhere downstream, grabbed a grapevine that happened to be dangling above me, and hung there, shocked to be alive. There’s more to the story, but what matters here is that ever since that day, I’ve understood what it means to be drowning one moment and safe the next. It is a gift simply to be able to breathe.
Passages like this one speak so clearly to me: I was drowning, overwhelmed, the psalmist says, but God plucked me out of the water.
MOVING FORWARD: Consider times when you’ve needed God’s saving grace, whether the “waters” be spiritual, psychological, or physical. How will you share the story of God saving you?
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