The Secret To Swimming Well

Something is going on at International Samaritan that reminds me a lot of a guy I saw at our local pool last week. That guy is me.

I started swimming laps for the first time in my life a few weeks ago. It’s pretty embarrassing. Older people fly by me, and they keep going for, like, hours. I take a break after every lap, only to keep from drowning. If I finish five laps, I’m on top of the world. The 75-year-old guy sharing my lane? He has 100 laps to go. Finally, yesterday, I asked for instruction from an older woman swimming in the lane next to me.

At first she declined, telling me she knows how to swim but wouldn’t know how to teach me. “Just answer this one question,” I pled with her, “Am I supposed to kick my feet fast or slow?”

The swimming lanes in the pool are three and a half-feet deep, and my feet keep bumping against the bottom when I swim. I know this can’t be good, but it happens regardless of how fast I kick my feet. There’s obviously something going wrong here.

The woman threw me a paddleboard and told me to hold onto it with my arms while kicking across the pool. Then she took one for herself and did the same in the lane next to me. I was so grateful for her help that I kicked with all my might. Unimpressed, she flew by me. I kicked and kicked and kicked some more and got nowhere, like a watermelon racing a speedboat. Mercifully, she came back, looked me over, and said the words I’ll never forget:

“Try moving your legs instead of just kicking your feet.”

That was the secret! All of a sudden, instead of dragging myself through the water by my arms, I am darting down my lane like a shark. At 54 years old, I finally learned how to swim! Guys twice my age are starting to get jealous of me.

Do you know how good it feels to make such a little change and have such a big impact? I’ve been swimming my entire life, but never really swimming until a stranger stopped to show me how. It’s exhilarating!

This is what it feels like to me at International Samaritan. We have been offering holistic scholarships for ten years, growing from 50 in 2013 to 900 this year, and we’ve become really good over time. But something is palpably different now. Over the last year, we’ve been leaning into the idea of building Samaritans for Life—graduates of our scholarship program dedicated to a life of loving God and loving their neighbor as Jesus loves them. Take a look at the stories on social media from the last few weeks, and you can see that our scholars are moving their legs, not just kicking their feet. They inspire me!

With two weeks to go in the IntSam Global 5K, 19 scholars desperately need some strangers to come alongside them. We have made scholarship commitments to 50 new scholars, but only 31 have been funded so far by 400 friends giving to their cause. Please prayerfully consider supporting one of the 19 in need today. Send me an email letting me know your commitment, and we’ll add it to our total. You can send your check or pay online any time before December 31.

Mike Tenbusch, IntSam President

Mike joined IntSam in 2018 after two decades of leading social change in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan. He’s a University of Michigan Law grad and author of The Jonathan Effect: Helping Kids and Schools Win the Battle Against Poverty. He and his wife, Maritza, have three children who keep them young.