If you have never seen the movie The Guardian with Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher, it’s definitely worth seeing. It is a movie about Coast Guard rescue swimmers and the heroic measures that they take to save those who are in trouble at sea. If a ship is going down and the Coast Guard gets called, these swimmers are called to jump out of a helicopter into raging waters to save those who are drowning. Most of the time those needing to be rescued go along easily with the rescue swimmers because they are in such dire need. One interesting scenario that the movie depicts however, is when someone who is drowning actually fights the rescue swimmer. The man who is drowning is freaking out so bad that he is making it next to impossible for the rescue swimmer to bring him to safety. What these rescue swimmers actually have to do in some of these situations is punch the guy who is drowning right in the face so that he stops fighting so that he can be rescued. It may seem a little counter intuitive but desperate times call for desperate measures.

I think that sometimes it works like this with God. God wants to rescue us from ourselves but we refuse to let go. He wants to swim us to safety away from the raging waters that we got ourselves into but we won’t let him do his job. We keep trusting in our feeble efforts to save ourselves thus missing out on the massive deliverance that he wants to bring about in our lives. Now it would be great if we would all just let go and trust but sometimes it doesn’t work out that way. I believe that sometimes God has to break us to get us to stop fighting him. In the same way that the rescue swimmers sometimes have to punch those they are trying to save, I think that God sometimes has to punch us right in the face. I believe he does this not because he doesn’t love us but precisely because he does. He knows that our desperate attempts at self salvation are doomed to failure and that the only way out of the storm is in his loving arms. Sometimes he must cause or allow desperate times in our lives to break us of our own strength so that we begin to trust in his strength.

Whose strength and power are you trusting in right now? Do you still think you can save yourself? What would happen if you just let go? Unfortunately we often don’t change until the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of the change. Sometimes the best thing we can do is just let go and let God do his job.