Does anyone ever forget taking swimming lessons as a kid? It’s one of the most traumatic times in childhood, because the people you trust the most (your parents) put you in the water with a stranger, and pays them to do this to you.
In my case, at the Meadowbrook Recreation Center in Salisbury, at the end of swimming lessons the last thing they made us do was to jump off the high dive. You 
don’t find high dives at swimming pools much anymore, because nowadays people are conscious of things like safety and preventing injuries and avoiding lawsuits. We didn’t have as many rules back then, and so we all had to jump off the high dive.
It’s one of those times when you’re scared to death, but you look down at your parents, and they’re saying, “You can do it!” You just have to trust them, and later on you’ll be glad you did.
This is a dynamic God often uses in our spiritual lives to grow our faith. We replace fear with faith, because it transforms us, it honors God, and it brings God glory. Fearful churches minister and serve in ways that reveal their fear, their timidity. It is God’s intent, however, that we be motivated and led, not by fear and anxiety, but by faith, and confidence in God. We can trust God to do what God has promised to do.
God knows the things we can’t do — that’s why God has chosen us. Our weakness gets held up against the backdrop of God’s strength. Where we are weakest is where God gets to show off the most — and that is always what increases and ignites our faith.
In the name of the One who can do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine,
Bruce Jones, Pastor and Co-Creator,
Imagine Church of the Carolinas
