She Jumped In

I was twelve years old, and I was drowning.

It happened the way accidents do — fast, and without warning. Our family had gone swimming with another family we knew, at a small beach on Kemp Lake. It was one of the first times we had done anything together like that — two families sharing a Saturday, the kind of ordinary summer afternoon that's supposed to become a pleasant memory. The water that day was the colour of strong tea, stained by cedar tannin from the surrounding forest, warm at the surface and startlingly cold a few feet down. The air smelled of pine and of the wet planks of a small dock. The mothers had spread blankets on the grass at the top of the slope. There was lemonade in a thermos. Everything was very ordinary, right up until it wasn't.

Then one of the boys, Ricky, ran along the dock and dove. I had just performed one of my famous duck dives, was surfacing, and never saw him coming. The next thing I knew, his shoulder or his knee — to this day I do not know which — caught me square in the chest, just below the rib cage and into my solar plexus. The impact knocked the wind completely out of me. One moment I was in the lake, pretending to be a duck; the next, my chest was a vacuum. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't call out. I couldn't do anything but go under.

What I remember from beneath the surface is unsettling — it was not so much fear as it was a kind of removed quiet. The lake closed over my head, and the noise of the world above — voices, splashing, a distant outboard motor — fell away into a muffled hum. I remember a strange amber light filtering down through the tea-coloured water and fighting my way to the surface one or two times. I also remember seeing the pale bottoms of feet moving above me, and a single thought: what’s happening to me and where is my mother?

My mother was there on the shore, to my right. I do not know exactly what she saw or did not see in those moments. What I know is that she did not come in.

But someone did.

The boy's mother — the mother of the very child who had knocked the wind out of me — saw what was happening and jumped into that water. When I rose to the surface of the water the final time, I remember seeing Mrs. P., wearing her dark one-piece bathing suit, running down the slope towards me in the water. When I went under again, she finally reached me. She hooked her arms under mine and pulled me out, into air, into sound, into the rest of my life.

I do not remember much after that. The way the mind protects itself from terror, the specific details blur at the edges. I remember being on the grass coughing up water and gasping for air, and hearing Mrs. P’s voice while she applied pressure to my upper body to help me breathe. I don’t remember hearing or seeing my mother while Mrs. P was helping me. But I do remember, minutes later, feeling the rough texture of somebody’s towel. I remember the long, quiet ride home, and how no one really seemed to know what to say. What is not a blur is this: I was on my way down for the last time - and a lady who was not my mother came in after me.

I have thought about that moment many times across the decades that followed. For much of my life I carried it as a quiet, unexplained thing — one of those incidents that sits in the memory without a frame around it. Why Ricky’s mom, Mrs. P? Why not my own mother? Why was this woman, who had every reason to be focused on her own child's mistake and its consequences, the one who moved?

I do not have a tidy answer to those questions. I am not sure I am meant to. What I have instead is something that took me most of a lifetime to recognize: that God does not always use the people we expect. He does not wait for the most qualified candidate, or the nearest relative, or the person with the clearest obligation. He uses whoever is paying attention. Whoever is willing to care, and willing to move.

That woman, Mrs. P, was paying attention, caring about a drowning kid – and she moved.

The eighteenth Psalm contains a verse I now read as a description of that afternoon, even though it was written three thousand years before it happened:

“He reached down from on high and took hold of me; he drew me out of deep waters.”Psalm 18:16 · NIV

I notice the verbs in that line — reached, took hold, drew. They are deliberate. They are not the verbs of a God who watches from a distance. They are the verbs of a God who comes in. And there is another psalm — the sixty-ninth — that begins, "Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck." That is the prayer I could not pray that day, because I had no breath to pray it. He answered it anyway. He used a mother's arms to do it. Not my mother's — someone else's entirely. And I have spent long enough being bitter about that distinction to know that the bitterness leads nowhere worth going. What does lead somewhere is the other question: not why her instead, but why anyone at all?

I was a twelve-year-old boy with a difficult home and a long road of pain still ahead. There was nothing particularly promising about me in that moment. No reason, by any human accounting, to make sure I made it out of that water.

And yet.

That is the word I keep coming back to. And yet. God works in the spaces that word opens up. Not because we deserve rescue, but because rescue is simply what He does — reaching into the places we are sinking, using whatever hands are willing and near, and pulling us toward air.

I did not understand any of this at the age of twelve. I went home, dried off, and kept living the only life I knew. The afternoon faded into the background of a childhood that had plenty of other things demanding my attention. By any reasonable accounting, the woman who came in after me was a stranger who happened to be in the right place. By the only accounting that matters in the end, she was an answer — to a prayer I had not even known how to make.

I did not drown.

And decades later, on the worst morning of my life, when I was going under in a very different way, I would discover that the same arms were still there. Still reaching. Still entirely unimpressed by the question of whether I deserved it.

He drew me out of deep waters. The first time, it was at Kemp Lake, and I did not even know enough to be grateful.

Things are different now.