Standing in the pool yesterday at physical therapy I had to just stand, shoulder depth, feet apart, turning my head side to side, and discover the result.  Not so good!  I ended up losing my balance several times.  For those of you who have known me a few years, the pool is a place I spent a lot of time for several years.  So to not be able to do the simplest things in the pool now is quite a shock to me.  I stood there swaying back and forth trying to catch my balance, not doing a very good job of it.

Then the next interesting feeling came when I had to hold small paddles and swing my arms underwater, that was great!  Made me rock back and forth in the water losing my balance so many times I would have fallen over on land!  To know that my physical body has been through a difficult journey the past four years is one thing to deal with.  But when I realize what having a small part of my brain removed has done to my abilities it is a difficult thing to process sometimes.  I stood in that pool swaying back and forth, thinking to myself “I use to spend hours in the pool a day, now I can’t even stand up straight in it!  Wow I really am messed up!”

Today though I think about how I stood there looking back and forth, or swinging my arms back and forth, and it wasn’t the standing that was the problem, it was the distraction.  That got me thinking, how often do we sway because we are not standing, looking where we are going, but looking side to side?  Paul tells us in Hebrews to “fix our eyes on Jesus”. (Heb 12:1-2)  Why?  So that we won’t get caught up in the sin that so easily entangles us.  We need to not be looking side to side, but looking ahead, focused and fixed on the goal ahead of us.  It is when we start looking aside, getting distracted, that we start swaying.

When I was using the paddles in the pool I stepped backwards to correct my balance problem.  When we are looking side to side, and we sway, that is when we reach to grab something to stop us from swaying.  Those things off to the side, those distractions, those sins that entangle us, they are not the things the Lord desires for us.  Have you ever gotten so distracted you grab onto one of those things to keep you from swaying?  It happens.  Problem is those things are sometimes like those paddles I held onto, they make you step backward.  Backward is not a good place to go with God.  There is however a fix to this, and that is to remember that even if we turned our heads, stepped backwards, even a lot, all we have to do is turn forward again and there stands Christ.