Swimming in a Mud Puddle

I am 50 years old and my mother still doesn't believe that I know how to swim.  I think it is a residual effect of her overprotective side.  When I was a kid she wouldn't even push me on the swing.  She would just set me on the swing and then run back and forth and say, "It's looks something like this."  But swimming was one of those things that she was always fearful of for me.  I learned to swim when I was 9 or 10, but since our family rarely swam together, she never really saw me.  I swam at camp, but it was just the boys, and dad was rarely there for the swim times, so I really didn't have a witness to convince her.  On a basketball trip just last year, when I was in the middle of my weight loss contest, I said, "I'm going to go down to the pool and swim some laps."  And I could see the uncertainty and concern in her eyes. 
My mom is great, and her concern for me is touching, but there are times in life when you just have to take a risk.  I think that there are a lot of people that are afraid to get into the water if it is any deeper than a mud puddle.  When I watched Michael Phelps win 8 Gold medals at the Olympics, the thought came to my mind, "You don't become an Olympic Champion by splashing around in mud puddles.  If you are ever going to be a swimmer, you have to jump in over your head every once in a while." 
The same is true in our Christian lives.  It is really hard to have any eternal impact if you aren't willing to jump in with both feet.  Jesus asked His followers to make a radical commitment.  He said that if they wanted to follow Him, that they would have to take up their crosses daily.  The cross in Jesus' day was not ornamental jewelry.  It was an instrument of death.  If we want to truly be like Jesus, we have to be prepared to die, to ourselves, to this world, and to anything that elevates itself into a position of competition with God.  We spend too much time splashing around in the puddles and too little time really making a difference.  As the signs of the times become more evident every day, I believe that we need to curl our toes over the edge of the pool and dive in.  Maybe when the medal is hanging around our neck, Mom will believe that we know how to swim.