There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How's the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’” (David Foster Wallace, This Is Water). Most of us go through life being swept along by currents and riptides and going with the natural flow of things and never even really noticing that we are swimming through water because it's all we've ever known. But just because it is natural to swim through the waters of life does not mean that this is where God intended us to end up. “For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.” (Mosiah 3:19) So how do we put off the natural man and rise above the waters of life? The Archimedes principle states, “Any object, totally or partially immersed in a fluid or liquid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object.” So, in order to something that would naturally sink and immerse itself in the water to fight against that natural tendency, it must displace, or to put in another way, “put off” a volume of water that weighs as much or more than the weight that would ordinarily drag it below the surface. When we strive to become a saint by yielding to the enticings of the Spirit, we become filled with the hope of Christ. This expands our souls to the point that we are displacing or putting off a greater weight of the natural man than we ourselves weigh, having already started the process of becoming a saint. Continuing to submit and become converted and transformed through repentance and through the Atonement of Jesus Christ and through submitting to the will of the Father will allow us to float above the natural currents of concern and doubt and fear that would ordinarily carry us about with or against our will. Hope in Christ has often been described as an anchor to the soul but it is also the chief source of buoyancy that can help us to rise above the challenges we face. It is no wonder that Jesus Christ was able to walk on water because He so thoroughly and completely had displaced or put off the natural man. I hope that we all can lay hold on every good hope and expand our souls so that they do not sink into the concerns of the natural man but instead float above them in the peace and the rest and the hope and the buoyancy of the Lord.
