I was in a “situation” once. I was at one of those wilderness camps, those with team-building exercises and lots of introspection and such-like. All very deep and character-building. One of the tasks set for us was to split into two teams, and to take an empty drum across a very full dam (it was in the middle of the rainy season). No raft was provided. And no, no boat either- we had to swim across.

Now anyone who knows me knows I have a pathological fear of large expanses of water. But we were assured that as our team was made up of swimmers and non-swimmers, the swimmers would look after those who could not swim. We would not drown. We only had to hold onto the drum, and the swimmers would get us across. Sounds so simple, right?

This turned out to be a spectacular example of how unreliable teams can be. Halfway across the lake, I found myself starting to sink (I have NO idea). The water was very muddy, and I could not see anything below the surface. Then my head was completely submerged, and there was no sign of the bottom. That would be the point when I realized I was drowning.

Thing is, this was the third time in my life that this had happened; but the previous episodes were in pools. A dam was another story. There were a gazillion more liters of water, for one, and since the water was muddy, my body might not be found until the rainy season was over. It also seemed to me a very undignified way to go out, not at all how I had imagined it. No celebrities or press to see, no fanfare, just me and dirty water.

But, well, something made me want to survive. The mind-numbing fear faded away, as I remembered that what makes you drown quickest is panic. So I calmed down, and somehow made my way back to the surface. Even though it had seemed like hours since I had begun to sink, the others were just a little way ahead, and no one had noticed a thing. (There was no “I” in “team”, you see).

Needless to say, I survived. It’s a situation where the fear of drowning was probably greater than the actual thing. The fear would have killed me. And yet, in the face of that blind panic, that feeling of being completely overwhelmed, in the absolute horror- I found the courage to live through the fear. I survived, in spite of it.

I am going through one of those dark periods of Christianity, when nothing seems to work, and God seems to be holding off His deliverance. I know He is here; I have learned to trust in His presence, whether I feel it or not. But the most real thing is the fear, the blind, irrational panic that tells me things will never be ok again. So much is being ripped away, and every day that I pray, the pressure only seems to increase. It’s a time of loss of so many things, including my courage. How can I take this seemingly endless taking away, when there’s not much hope of anything coming in? in other words, my eyes of faith are pretty blind right now.

But I am taken back to that time in the dam, and the feeling of drowning… I relive that panic in my present fear of loss of control… And yet I remember, too, how that was not the end of the story. In spite of the threat to my life, I lived through it. Somehow, resources came when they were needed; and after a while, what I could dimly see in my head- my survival beyond that point in time- became reality. I didn’t give up; I did what I knew to do, all I knew to do at the time…

And I’m still here.