This is About YOU...

November 14, 2012

“The third time he said to him, Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, ‘Do you love me?’ He said, ‘Lord, you know all things; you know I love you.’ Jesus said, ‘Feed my sheep. I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.’ Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, ‘Follow me!’

“Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them. (This was the one who had leaned back against Jesus at the supper and had said ‘Lord, who is going to betray you’). When Peter saw him he asked, ‘Lord, what about him?’

Jesus answered, ‘If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me.”

John 21: 17 -22

As part of my Dive Master certification for scuba diving I had to take a rescue diver course. This was the least favorite of my training courses because it involved no diving, and it required that I learn all of the skills required to be an emergency first responder – on land and in the ocean. But, as a Dive Master, it is the most important course because when you are a Dive Master, diving is no longer about you. Diving is about the group of less experienced, often overly anxious and flighty or arrogant and overconfident, divers that you lead into a beautiful, but dangerous new world at the risk of harm or, worse, an incredibly painful death.

The land part of the training was not all that exciting. I learned CPR and emergency first aid, practiced on dummies that were well worn in the third world country where I was diving. I learned the book strategies, saw the pictures of what happens when a diver panics and races to the water’s surface, and learned how a hyperbaric chamber works. I learned the emergency radio codes, how to lie a motionless body on the ground so they are best suited for treatment, and a list of other incredibly tedious and seemingly unnecessary skills for saving someone else’s life.

The most exciting part for me came during the one time when we got to go in the dive boat out into the water. There were four of us taking the course together, and we had grown close through our training and our nights of drinking, and each of us would get an opportunity to be a “panicked diver” on this trip. That meant that we would float out in the water and wait for the rescue diver to swim up and try and pull us back to the boat. The only rule was: make it as hard as possible for the rescue diver to bring you in.

It was here that I learned perhaps the most important lesson about being a rescue diver and, having applied it to this scripture, perhaps in being a human being in general:

Before you can even attempt to save another person, you must first make sure that you are safe.

Our instructor emphasized this point again and again as each of the four of us beat each other to death on the water. “See,” she would say in her French accent. “That is why you must first protect yourself.” I came back to the boat with a bloody nose the first time, from my Israeli friend. He floated in the water smiling, knowing that he had just had the best of me.

The most important part about saving someone else’s life was making sure that you would not become the next victim, a burden that someone else would then have to rescue. I am sure this applies to police and firefighters and military and other emergency first responders.

Take the time to assess the situation, develop a strategy for staying safe, and then go save a life.

Once the bleeding let up, I swam back out to my friend and I did just that. I saw he was facing me smiling, ready to take another shot at me in his flailing on top of the water. So I let the air out of my BCD (inflatable dive vest), swam beneath him, and then tugged on his feet from underwater a few times. I came up on the other side of him, having confused him, and then I clocked him on the back of the head.

Completely confused, he clutched the knot forming on the back of his head and gave up his struggle. I put him in a headlock, securing his body with mine, and I kicked our way back to the boat.

“Bien fait,” my instructor cheered! “Well done!”

I thought what I had done was extreme and not necessarily acceptable, but she asked me if I managed to get my friend back to the boat safely.

Yes, I told her.

Then I had done my job as a rescue diver. In first protecting myself I had managed to save a panicking diver from potentially drowning or embolism or otherwise. 

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As I look back on Peter, he was eager to save the world. I love Peter for his raw emotions. We are so much the same! He almost always acted on impulse, without carefully assessing the situation. From moment one, when he abandoned his father and his life as a fisherman to follow a stranger who tapped him on the shoulder, to the time he recklessly stepped out into a seething ocean to walk on water toward Jesus, to when he zealously cut the ear off of a man coming to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, to his thoughtless denial three times of Jesus in a matter of minutes…

Peter was impulsive, but passionate in his desire to build the Kingdom.

So when Jesus riled him up again, asking him three times if Peter loved Him (unknown to Peter, who was gaining redemption for each of his three denials), Peter’s emotions got the best of him yet again.

“But what about that guy, Jesus? We all know that he is your beloved! Why can’t he come with us?”

“Because this is about you,” I can hear Jesus saying. “Before I can build my church upon you Peter, my Rock, YOU must first follow me. Don’t worry about the other guys. They will be fine. This is our time, let me love you in it.”

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I am at a point in my life where I am ready to race off in missions. I am ready to go try and get dirty for the Lord, building the Kingdom one person at a time. I know I am called to go. We all are. But I want this time to be now. I had to hit “cancel” three times in the last two weeks on a computer screen to purchase one-way tickets to Tanzania and Honduras.

But in those quiet morning hours, when I wake in darkness worried about everything that is or is not going well in my life, assessing all I have and all I have lost, I can hear Jesus telling me to calm down. He’s telling me to set aside my emotions, my desires to race off and serve. He’s telling me, simply, to follow Him… to let Him love me and to heal me.

I am a broken man.

I am a sinner many times over.

I am unable to save myself, let alone anyone else.

But Jesus isn’t asking me to save the world.

He is just calling me to Him…