Learning to Swim

There are many true stories that I could tell about my late father, Hatley Wiseman, if I could simply remember them all. Sometimes, things from our childhood return to us, and it is fun to recall them. The other day, I was thinking about how I learned to swim, and maybe some of you will remember how you learned, but my experience was, at least interesting.

The family down the street from us had a swimming pool, and I was invited to their house one summer day to take a plunge. They asked me if I knew how to swim, and I told them"Oh yeah, sure I know how to swim."...knowing all along that I could not swim much better than a rock. That's exactly what happened, as one of the neighbor's son had to drag my limp, water-logged body out of the deep end, after I sank like a lead weight. Thankfully, I did not drown, but I think that I swallowed about a gallon of water.

The next week, my Daddy paid for me to have swimming lessons at the local recreation dept. I did really well, learning how to float; how to do the dog paddle, and a few other things, all in the shallow end. But then the day came to go off the diving board in the deep end. As I approached the end of the diving board, I froze in fear; I could not jump. One of the instructors tried to coax me off, and ended up peeling me off the board like fly paper, and they had to extract me from the water, as I could not swim. After they dragged me out, I looked over at the gate of the pool, and there stood my dad. All the way home in the car, he scolded me about how he had wasted his money on lessons for me, and that he just could not understand my fear. I was embarrassed and humiliated, and I was very sad that I had let my dad down, and after all of that, I still could not swim...very sad.

For some reason, Daddy took this on as a challenge, partly, because he did not want me to drown, and he also did not like failure; he wanted the best for me, like he always wanted for all of his kids. Ironically, our family loved the water; we had a ski boat, and a place on the lake, and I wanted to learn how to water ski, but I knew that Daddy wanted me to learn to swim first.

So the next time we went on a trip to the lake, my dad announced to me. "You are going to learn to swim!!!" I said, "Oh yeah, right?" Daddy said confidently, "Oh yeah, you can count on it"

I awaited the moment with trepidation, for I did not know what his method be. Well , sometime in the middle of the day on the day that I learned to swim, we went down to the boat dock, and my father jumped into the water, and gave me a demonstration on how to swim. I watched, and enjoyed his demo, but I did not enjoy the next part, because he climbed out of the lake, walked over to me, and literally threw me into the deep water, I came up, spitting, flailing, and screaming that I could NOT swim. He yelled at me, and said, " I taught you what to do, now swim...swim! I am not going to jump and help you...swim!" I had a decision to make...sink or swim. Well, I guess that I must have made the right one, because I am here to write this story.

The fact is, that when I tried the techniques that my dad had taught me, which really were simple, I swam for the rest of the day like a fish, and every day for the rest of the summer; I was one happy camper.

As I was reminiscing this event in my life recently, I was comparing it to our Heavenly Father, how he has given us everything that we need to know for life, and He even throws us into the lake at times, so that we must depend on Him; He loves it when we call on Him, for God loves us, and even when we think that He might let us sink, He won't let that happen, when we trust Him, and guess what He knows all along that we can depend on Him, just like my Earthly father knew that he could save me from drowning, but he also knew that I could swim.

This story is dedicated to my good friends Ann&Hank Clark. Ann has been thrown in the deep end, but don't worry Ann, God has you in His Hand!