The Unshakable Rock: Finding the Rock who holds when we are drowning

There is always something deep within us that pushes us upward when we are drowning.

It began in the chapel one morning, as these things often do: a sudden, powerful impression of God as my unshakeable Rock. In that moment, the Spirit brought it all rushing back, and I was twelve years old again, back at the river near my childhood home.

I remembered the day with perfect clarity. It was a lazy afternoon, and I was swimming with my neighboring boy, who was also my classmate. I was a swimmer; he was not. He relied on a banana tree trunk, one of those simple supports we used back in our village to stay afloat.

Fighting for Life

I came out of the water for a breath, planning to dive back in. My friend was fine, drifting peacefully with his banana stem. Then, in an instant, everything changed. Perhaps due to a strong current, the stem slipped out from under his belly and swept downstream, and suddenly he was in free water, panicking, thrashing, eyes wide with a terror I had never seen before. From the shore, I watched him go under, come up gasping, go under again.

There was no one else around. I was the only one who could do something. Without thinking, I dove into the deep water. But here is what nobody tells you about drowning: the drowning do not want saving. They want to climb. When I reached him, he did not take my hand. He grabbed me. His arms locked around my neck, his legs locked around me with a grip I could not break. He was not a large boy, but at that moment, he felt impossibly heavy. I felt my strength dissolve. I realised I was not saving him; I was drowning with him.

We went down together. I remember the water going silent around us, the burn in my lungs, the cold seeping into my limbs. I kicked, I pulled, I fought his grip, but his weight was an anchor dragging both of us deeper. And in that moment of absolute clarity (the kind that comes right before the end), I understood: we were going to die.

I had nothing left. No air, no plan, no strength. So I did the only thing left to do. I stopped thinking and cried out from the depths of my soul: “Jesus!”

It was a scream of total desperation. And then I felt it. My foot—numb, half-frozen hit something hard. Not the soft mud of the bottom. Something solid. Rough. Cold. I touched it again. It was a rock—a jagged, slippery stone jutting up from the deep, invisible from above, absolutely immovable below. I did not hesitate. I planted my foot on it. It was held. I pushed with everything I had left, that one small point of contact, and we shot upward. We broke the surface, both of us gasping and choking, alive. I dragged him to shore, and we collapsed on the bank.

The Rock of my Life

Decades later, sitting in the chapel, it all came rushing back and I realised something. We imagine God as a rescue from above, a hand reaching down, pulling us out, saving us from the water. That is what we want, anyway. But my experience was different. God did not pull me out of the water. He met me in the water. He was the rock at the bottom. This changed everything I thought about God. When you are sinking under the weight of the world, and you neither can pull yourself up nor hold on forever, you will need something that does not move, something outside of you, something that was planted deep long before you ever got here. He is Christ, the stone that holds when everything else is being swept away. He is the one you find when you finally stop thrashing and let yourself sink into His presence. He is planted deep, deeper than our fear, deeper than our pain, deeper than anything this world can do to us.

If you are in deep water right now, drowning under your own struggles or trying to save someone you love and sinking along with them, here’s what I learned in that moment. The promise is not that the river will dry up. It is that there is always a Rock in the river. This Rock—the one who became flesh and dwelt among us—gives you the strength to push up for one more breath. He is the unshakeable point in a world that is always shaking.1

1 This article appeared in the May/June 2026 issue of Shalom Tidings. Reproduced with permission.