Swimming Upstream

Upstream in calm, crystal pure pools, nascent salmon minnow
lurk about in bone chilling temperatures. But to the tiny aquatic
vertebrate it feels like a warm bath, the perfect equilibrium
between new formed scales and water. Alas she cannot stay here
for she must drift downstream, undergo bodily transformation,
smolt, and live most her life in the expanse of the ocean.
Although those waters are brackish, sustenance is abundant and
the boundaries are limitless.

But something inside of her eventually calls her back to her
roots. She’s instinctually drawn to her place of birth in order to
give birth. Like mass to gravity, the pull is irresistible. However
the trek home is anything but like what she initially experienced
when venturing out into that uncharted abyss. She must this
time swim upstream, perhaps hundreds of miles, in the same
watercourse she first found consoling but now present the most
death defying obstacles of life.

The journey seems absolutely impossible. There’s
acclimatization from saline to fresh H2O. There are jagged
rocks, crushing waterfalls, and swift driving rapids that must
either be herculean hurdled or prodigiously pressed through.
Starvation, exhaustion and lacerations bring the fish to the
brink of death, all the while, and unbeknownst to the salmon,
her flesh is turning from a luminous pink to a radiant snow
white. With unflinching perseverance, she amazingly reaches
her destination never to return from whence she came. Now
she satisfyingly spawns that life may continue from her sacrifice.
It cost all she had – her life. Such was her destiny, and the
seemingly impossible was somehow miraculously possible.

There’s a lot of swimming upstream for us Christians – a lot
of “impossibilities” out there. This should come as no surprise.
Jesus said that, “In the world you have tribulation” (John 16:33b).
These are life’s raging rapids and perilous fish ladders of stress,
physical suffering, broken hearts and the like. Thus is the nature
of existing in a warped world. We live in an expanse, much
like the salmon in the briny sea. Yet we are not of it, much like
those same salmon from the fresh water river. We are “those who
reside as aliens, scattered throughout…” the world, “… chosen
according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, by the sanctifying
work of the Spirit, to obey Jesus Christ and be sprinkled with His
blood” (I Peter 1:1b-2a). Hence our destiny, living the seemingly
impossible through the One who makes it possible, all the while
drawing notice to the miraculous possibility-Maker who has
overcome the world.

But He who first made life here possible is the same one who
seems to convey that life beyond is also impossible. Jesus
appears to leave little room for coasting downstream to get
there, perched in the comfort of this world. “He who loves his
life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it to life
eternal” (John 12:25), said the Master. “… sell all that you possess
and distribute it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven;
and come, follow Me” (Luke 18:22b), He tenderly instructed the
rich, inquisitive young man. “If anyone wishes to come after Me,
he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me”
(Luke 9:23b), was Jesus’ “dead-man-walking” directive to His
best of friends.

Life here most certainly does seem impossible at times,
the travails overwhelming. And life beyond? Why utterly
unattainable. It’s the upstream struggle of swimming into
eternity, the starvation and exhaustion of wholly letting go
of our lives with resolute persistence to the very end. Jesus’
closest and most intimate friends eventually concluded with
exasperation, “Then who can be saved?” (Luke 18:26b)

If we stopped with the disciples’ question, then hopelessness is
all we’re left with. There’s no sense making the voyage, and we
might as well just float in our world out there and soak it all in
while we can. But Jesus leaves his friends, and us, with hope. In
fact, it’s extraordinary hope. Except it’s hope not found here, but
there. He makes this abundantly clear when He gazed into their
eyes and replied, “With men it is impossible, but not with God; for
with God all things are possible.” (Mark 10:27b) However it will
cost something. In fact, it will cost everything. For our Creator
the price was His prize, the Son. To the contrary for us the price
is free, for “freely you have received” (Matthew 10:8b; cf. Romans
6:23). And now, like the salmon’s skin, sin’s crimson stains are
washed whiter than snow. (Elvina M. Hall, “Jesus Paid It All”)

But does the free gift of grace set us free from the cost of even
our own lives? Can we now just roam about in this vastness
without ever treading upstream to head home? “Grace alone does
everything, they say, and so everything can remain as it was before”,
sarcastically declares Dietrich Bonhoeffer of many Christians.
(“The Cost of Discipleship”) Can this be said of us? How
so knowing that Jesus died for all in order that we no longer
live for ourselves, but for the One who died and rose on our
behalf? What love! From Him, which now controls us. (cf. II
Corinthians 5:14-15)

So the course of our love is to leave the known and venture
into territory we know will not be at all what we left behind.
And to set our course in that direction, upstream if you will
and right in the face of peril, requires the impossible of man
from the possible God. Selling possessions to give to the poor,
abandoning the “American dream” by leaving homes to rent in
“undesirable” urban neighborhoods, saying goodbye to family
to love abroad, forsaking vocational success to increase margins
for benevolence, serving the incarcerated, sacrificing vacations
to give to the needy, welcoming the homeless, departing the
comfort of Grace Bible Church to plant another, and appearing
foolish all for the sake of Jesus that life eternal might proliferate,
these are but a drop from the deep of radical possibilities in an
impossible world. And when we live this way, in the opposite
direction of the world’s current, we “live a life that demands an
explanation” (Francis Chan). And Christian lives that demand
explanations can only be explained by one thing, and that
one thing is not us. It was never us, but always Jesus, for we
are those who “… are His workmanship, created in Jesus Christ
for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should
walk in them.” (Ephesians 2:10) If Jesus created us for this,
long before we ever basked in that balmy and secluded pool of
amniotic fluid, then we can remain “… confident of this very
thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until
the day of Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 1:6)

The water’s cold, the shallows hazardous, the falls crushing, but
let’s go swimming anyway… upstream.

-Tom Kruggel