If you’re waiting to be rescued, what are you still waiting for?

By David McElroy · May 7, 2019

Few of us like to admit that we sometimes need to be rescued.

We like to believe we’re self-sufficient. We like to believe that nothing can stop us. We like to believe that we don’t need outside help. But when we’re honest with ourselves, we all know better.

Have you ever been in trouble and pleaded with God to help you? Those of us who are Christians know what it’s like to pray about our troubles and to ask God for help. But even non-religious people are prone to begging God for help when things get bad enough in their lives.

Have you ever been in the depths of despair — begging to God or the Universe or fate for help — and wondered why the solution you desperately wanted never showed up?

Maybe the answer to your prayer was already right in front of you. Maybe you were ignoring it because it wasn’t what you wanted or expected. Maybe it wasn’t convenient.

As I thought this morning about this common human pattern — something I’ve been guilty of — I thought of an old story that I heard in a sermon one time.

There was once a man whose neighborhood flooded and he fled to his roof to escape the rising waters. He prayed for God to rescue him.

Then another man came floating by in a rowboat, and he shouted out to the man to jump in.

“I can save you,” the man said. “I have room for you.”

But the stranded man declined his help.

“No, that’s OK,” he shouted back. “I’m praying to God for help and he’s going to save me. I’m waiting for a miracle.”

So the man in the rowboat moved on.

A few minutes later, another man came by, this time in a motorboat. He shouted for the man on the roof to get into his boat, but the stranded man turned him down.

“No thanks,” he called back. “I’m praying to God and he’s going to save me. I have faith in the Lord.”

So the motorboat went on.

Then a helicopter flew near the man’s house and the pilot spotted the stranded man. The waters had risen far enough that the man was perched on the last exposed part of his roof.

“Grab this rope,” the pilot shouted, “and I can pull you up.”

“No thanks,” the man shouted back. “I’m praying to God and he is going to save me. I have faith.”

So the pilot reluctantly left the man on the roof. The waters finally rose high enough to cover the entire roof. The man had nowhere to go, so he drowned.

After the man got to heaven and had a chance to talk with God, he expressed frustration and anger.

“I had faith in you but you didn’t save me,” he said bitterly. “You let me drown. I don’t understand why.”

But God saw things differently.

“I sent you a rowboat and then a motorboat and finally a helicopter,” God said. “I heard your prayers and answered. What more did you expect?”

When we’re unhappy, we look for answers. But we have strong opinions about what the solutions have to look like. We’re picky. We’re unwilling to make trade-offs.

And then we find ourselves stuck with a lifelong problem, one which had a solution that was offered to us. After it’s too late, we discover that we had the solution we were looking for — but we were too blind to accept it.

Everybody needs help at times, but it’s up to us to accept the help which can change things for us. Nobody else can do that.

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Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

Narcissists tend to turn their children into narcissists — and since a narcissist doesn’t realize he or she is a narcissist, there’s no bad intent. How does this happen? I watched a YouTube video over the weekend from an Australian psychologist who does a nice job of summarizing how it works. None of this is new to me, but I thought it was useful for those who haven’t spent years digging through books and articles about it. The same psychologist has an excellent summary of something which confuses a lot of people about narcissism. You’ve all seen examples of the loud, boisterous and overbearing narcissist, but what about the ones who are more introverted and vulnerable? This type is called a covert narcissist (or a vulnerable narcissist), and this is what my father was. In the first video, I strongly see myself in the ways my father treated me and in the second video, I see what my father was almost successful in making me become.

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