Seeing those riptide signs

When we are out-of-town together on a Sunday, my parents and I usually do “church” in the hotel room.

Staying at the Country Inn & Suites (we decided our plain Jane room was the country part of the inn rather than the suite part) after a friend’s wedding, we held our service on the beds in the room yesterday morning.

We started reading in Philippians 1, some verses that my dad found, but our conversation reached much further than that. We talked how to become doers instead of hearers, how we take advantage of God’s grace, how we do what we want to do even when we know it’s not necessarily what God wants us to do.

One of the sections of the conversation, my mom relayed a metaphor she heard about people who grow up as Christians, like me. It’s like we’re sitting on a beach, and we see a sign for a riptide. We are saved from the riptide - accepting Jesus - but we never actually get caught in the riptide, so sometimes we don’t really know what we are saved from.

However, I looked at that from my perspective and kind of went on from there.

I have sat on that sunny beach of salvation for a long time. The signs warning against the riptides are still around me, but I have gotten comfortable there. I don’t really read the signs very often or worry about what they say.

After a while, I started to take a look at that water and see how fun it looked. I walked slowly down the beach and started to dabble my toes in the water.

As I’ve gotten used to seeing the riptide signs, I haven’t even thought about them as I wade in the water.

I think a lot of Christian youths have trouble with getting comfortable with a message they are so used to growing up. We believe in the Gospel and have taken Jesus as our Savior, but sometimes we get used to the beach and stop thinking about what we have been saved from.

It was an interesting analogy that I think could be taken many different ways.

I appreciated talking through a lot of things with my parents. They are both very wise from their years walking with the Lord, and they are a great blessing in my life.

It was also nice to be with my dad on Father's Day. He is a wonderful father, the best there ever was. Love you dad :)