Sam Matteson

Original poem and photograph by Sam Matteson. Permission is granted for non-commercial use. (Click on figure to enlarge.)

We can often learn much from the most innocent among us if we are really listening. As my wife and I visited the gulf coast of Alabama during the past week that included my 50^th high school reunion, I was reminded of the story of the first visit to the sea shore of a young girl who had just learned to swim. She ran down the dunes to the beach but stopped short of the surf and looked from her toes in the foam that swirled about her feet up to the horizon in the distance. After standing for several minutes silently contemplating the expanse of blue before her, she said in a small voice: “I think that I will swim in the shallow end.”

The picture above is of our daughter Carrie when she first visited the Pacific Ocean in the late1970s. I held her hand that day as we played in the ocean, just as my father had held mine in the years before when I was a child and we visited the gulf and played in the surf. I recall the feeling of the swells rolling into the shore lifting me, with the help of my Dad’s strong grip. My feet often did not touch the sand beneath the waves, but Dad was always there.

Then I grew up. My father did not hold my hand very often after that, until the day he died and in an unnatural reversal, I held his hand—though he did not know it, stricken by an ultimately fatal stroke as he was. In that dark night, I thought again of sweet Carrie’s plea from years before: “Don’t leave me alone my Daddy. I don’t want night to get into my eyes.” Yes, too often it seems to me I have let night get into my eyes and darken my soul. Too often I feel at sea and like Peter who began so well bidden by Christ to come to him upon the sea, I seem only to sink down. Yet, I take comfort in the words of Matthew’s gospel that follow: “ [W]hen [Peter] saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’ Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him.” (Matthew 14: 30,31)

I did not choose to swim in the deep end of the sea, but life has cast me there. Many times I have seen the waves and felt their swell and was afraid. It was then that night began to get into my eyes and I reached out and caught hold of a hand not my own. So I persist swimming on without touching the bottom, fearfully at times but hopefully as well, swimming in the deep end of life.  My own child taught me this.