My favourite animal is the hippopotamus. After the elephant and rhinoceros, the hippopotamus is the third-largest type of land mammal, and I suspect my love of this animal has much to do with its ungainliness on land compared to its grace in water.
I think I probably identify with the hippo because most of the time I feel slow, ungainly, unwieldy, inelegant and (for most of my life) downright fat. But just as this is a fair description of a hippo on land, when I watch hippos swim, there is a completely different picture presented for me: not for nothing does its name come from the Greek for ‘river horse’!
In water, the hippo is transformed, swimming elegantly (despite its size) and apparently effortlessly, frolicking at times with other hippos, completely at ease in water whereas on land, it looks uncomfortable, lumbering and totally lazy!
For me, this is a parable of grace. Our lives are spent mainly on terra firma, where we learn to work, to strive, to make every effort to live well. That kind of living – by self-effort and sheer work – places huge responsibilities on our shoulders and becomes wearisome and burdensome. Everything depends on us and we walk around like Atlas, carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders. We are the ones who have to fix the world’s problems, care for the needy, sort out the mess we find ourselves in. It’s an impossible situation.
God did not intend us to live like that. He operates in an entirely different medium, that of grace. Unmerited favour. Undeserved blessing. Love lavished on us simply because that is His nature. He is the One working all things together for good, weaving His plans into our history and our history into His plans. Anyone who has ever learnt to swim knows there are moments of abject terror when self-preservation reasons that this liquid cannot possibly support our weight or keep us buoyant. But while we fight the medium, we splutter and cough and sink; it’s only when we learn to trust the water that we float and swim. And the feelings we get when we are carried along by the water are (in my opinion) far better than when we are trudging through land! In water, we feel weightless, free, carried along by something greater than ourselves, just as the hippo seems to be in its element in water compared to on dry land.
People were meant to live in the medium of God’s grace. That means abdicating our own efforts and trusting in His. When put as baldly as that, the choice seems ridiculously simple. And it is. But ‘grace is an insubstantial, invisible reality that permeates all that we are, think, speak, and do. But we are not used to living by invisibles.’ (Eugene Peterson, ‘Practise Resurrection’, P 94) Just as it requires courage to trust that the water will be miraculously buoyant when learning to swim, it takes courage and great faith to live by grace, rather than by our own efforts. ‘Faith in Christ is a plunge into grace,’ Eugene Peterson continues. It’s a plunge I recommend.