Don't give up on life

Awhile ago, I was at a beach area with my family during the summer. I really wanted to learn how to surf, and when I saw a store that rented surfboards I got excited.

At the first opportunity, I rented a board and walked toward the sea. It was a cloudy, windy day, and there was nobody on the beach. I didn't stop to think about the ocean conditions. As it turned out, the waves were taller than they'd seemed from the beach, and there was a very strong current.

I started surfing in the shallow waters. I picked it up pretty quickly, and started to go farther out, without paying attention to the current and the force of the waves. When the space between one wave and the next became smaller, I had to make a lot of effort just to keep swimming, because the water would pull me down. It was difficult to return to the surface to breathe.

At a certain point I couldn't climb onto the board again, so I decided to go back closer to the beach. But I couldn't leave that spot because of the tremendous force of the undertow. With each wave that passed, I would sink and spin around, so that I would lose my point of reference as to where the surface was. Only the tug of the surfboard, which was tied to my ankle, helped me keep my orientation.

Then an enormous wave broke right over me and snapped the cord that held the surfboard. From that moment on I no longer knew where the surface was. I kept spinning under the water! I was tired and out of breath. I felt my body go limp.

I have attended the Christian Science Sunday School since childhood. There I learned how to understand the Bible and Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy. During the classes, we also analyzed the situations that occur in people's lives and discussed how to face down problems mentally. Many times people told about their experiences, and this instruction from another's experience served as a real shortcut in teaching us what to think and do in similar situations. We talked about practically any and every subject that had to do with our life, and on more than one occasion we touched on the thought of death and the spiritual ideas from God that save us and keep us alive.

In that moment of extreme need in the ocean, the feeling that I was going to die was very strong. I thought I might black out and drown. I felt afraid. I began to see a beam of light, an intense light, although my eyes were closed. But at that moment, things that had been said during those Sunday School classes came to my thought.

One idea, in particular, changed the direction of the events occurring during those moments: "We should not give our consent to death. We should not give up on Life, for Life is God!"

Immediately, I thought, "I'm not going to give up!" My strength came back to me. I began to swim again, but with more vigor, although the sea's conditions hadn't changed.

After about 20 minutes I reached shore. As I swam back, I remembered the rented board. I did not accept that it was lost, because nothing is ever lost in the kingdom of God, in the kingdom of Life. As soon as I got back to shore, another young person came to me with the board. He had found it, and since I was the only one around, he figured it was mine.

I sat there on the sand, looking at the sea, and began to be very afraid. "I'm going to return the board, and I'll never set foot in the sea again," I thought. At the same time, though, I realized this was not what I wanted to be thinking. There was nothing in God's creation that could harm me, not even the sea. Swimming and surfing are expressions of the dominion God gave to us, the dominion spoken of in the first chapter of Genesis, where God says, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth" (verse 26 ). I decided I would not give up this dominion, just as I hadn't given up on Life.

I prayed for a few minutes, thinking of God. I thought about His being everywhere. Then I returned to the sea and continued my learning process. This time, naturally, I paid more attention to the depth, because prudence was part of the dominion I had from God.

Reprinted from The Herald of Christian Science (Portuguese Edition), January 2000.