Video of what happened next has traveled around the country, and I confess I have watched it more than once. The young lifeguard swam into surf that was tossing grown men like driftwood. He reached the boy and held on. He could not, at first, bring him in ΓÇö the waves kept driving them back ΓÇö so he simply refused to let go. On the shore, something else was happening. Strangers who had never met began linking arms and wading into the whitewater, forming a human chain toward the two of them. The surf tore that chain apart. They formed it again. It broke again. They kept reaching. At last a second lifeguard plunged in, and together they brought the boy to shore, where paramedics looked him over and released him, shaken but safe, into the arms of his parents.
I have not been able to shake the picture of that chain. The Preacher wrote long ago, "Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him to lift him up" (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10). And a little further on: "and a threefold cord is not quickly broken" (Ecclesiastes 4:12). On Saturday the cord did break ΓÇö more than once. What moves me is not that the chain held. It is that every time the sea ripped those strangers apart, they found each other's hands again.
That, I think, is the truest picture of the church I have seen in a long while. We like to imagine that the people of God are an unbreakable line, but any honest pastor will tell you otherwise. We fail one another. Grief and sin and plain exhaustion tear our grip loose. The question is never whether the chain will be strained; it is whether we will wade back in and take hold again. A congregation is not a monument. It is a line of ordinary people, standing in water over their heads, reaching for someone they cannot yet see.
And there is a deeper current running beneath the story. When Peter stepped out of the boat and felt the sea beneath him give way, Scripture says, "But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me. And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?" (Matthew 14:30-31). Immediately. Not after Peter proved himself a stronger swimmer. Not after a lecture on the shore. The hand came first; the gentle correction came after, while Peter was already safe in his grip. Every human rescue is a small echo of that greater one. We were all, at some point, the child in the water ΓÇö out past our depth, unable to save ourselves, kept alive by a strength that was not our own.
I keep thinking, too, about that lifeguard's age. Sixteen. Young enough that some would have forgiven him for hesitating. He did not hesitate. Courage, it turns out, does not wait for gray hair, and neither does calling. Some of the most faithful hands in the body of Christ belong to the young, if the rest of us will honor them enough to let them reach.
So here is my question for us this week, and for myself first of all: who is in the water near you? Not everyone who is drowning is in the ocean. Some are drowning in loneliness, in debt, in grief, in quiet despair, and they are close enough to shore that a single person paying attention could raise the alarm. You may not be the strong swimmer. You may only be one link in a chain that keeps breaking. Wade in anyway. Take hold of the hand next to you. And when your grip fails ΓÇö as it will ΓÇö reach again. The God who caught a sinking fisherman is not finished making rescuers out of ordinary people.
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