Stuck in Quicksand

Audio By Carbonatix

I have a friend who bought a piece of rural property, and after the deal was completed, he started walking the property to get familiar with the land that he had purchased. As he was exploring, he stepped into some quicksand that he obviously didn’t know was there. Before I heard this story, I had generally assumed that the existence of quicksand was mostly an exaggeration. I guess I thought that the concept of quicksand basically existed to use as a plotline to add some intrigue to movies and TV shows. But my friend assured me that it is very, very real. And he tells me that the more he struggled, the more he sank. 

He quickly realized that if things went on at the same pace, it wouldn’t be long before he would be completely swallowed up by this quicksand. He tried to come up with some way to survive, and he finally found his best option. It wasn’t a great one, but it was something. He reached out and grabbed onto the trunk of a small sapling and held on as tight as he could. Somehow, the roots on that little tree held their grip on the soil, and my friend managed to hold his grip too. Eventually his kids found him and were able to help get him out of the quicksand. 

Talk about a terrifying situation. One minute he was just walking around his new property. The next minute he was fighting for his life! While most of us can’t relate to that experience literally, pretty much everybody can relate to it metaphorically, can’t we? Because life can sometimes feel like that story. One minute you’re walking around like usual, and you don’t mean to step into anything. But you step right into it and, before you know it, you’re knee deep in it. Then it progresses to being waist deep. And things get really scary really quickly. 

When we run across quicksand in our lives, we need to have some kind of sapling that provides us stability and safety in the midst of chaos. In hard times some people rely on their family and close loved ones. Other people rely on some kind of mental health tool or practice. I personally lean on both of those things, but my biggest support, by far, is my faith in God. No matter what I’m facing, I trust that He is with me and He is for me–even when I can’t see how and I can’t see the way forward in the middle of the chaos. 

One thing that we can be sure of in life is that we’ll all run into tough situations. They’ll be all over the place on the scale of hard things; some will be small and some will be big. Whether we’re facing an inconvenience, a medium-sized problem, or a tragedy, we can be sure that we are not alone in facing these challenges. Facing these sorts of things is just part of what it means to be alive. That doesn’t make facing them easier, and it isn’t meant to minimize the pain these challenges bring along with them. But I think normalizing the fact that we’ll all face challenges is a helpful reminder for each of us. Facing a challenge isn’t an indication that life is somehow “going wrong”; it’s actually just part of life. 

As you face challenges, find the people and the things that you can rely on to help keep you stable and grounded in the midst of chaos. When you do that, you’ll be winning more often at home.