If you’ve ever taken kids on vacation, you know things don’t always go as planned. We learned that lesson the hard way on our first family trip to the beach.

My daughter was only 21 months old and had never seen the ocean before. I couldn’t wait to introduce her to the waves and white sands of Destin, Florida. As much as I loved the ocean myself, I knew it would be a hundred times better experiencing it through her eyes. 

As she was approaching her second birthday we booked a condo right on the beach and packed up for the biggest road trip of my toddler’s life.  

She was such a trooper on the drive. No fussing. No pull up disasters. No problems at all. In my head I was already thinking about how much fun we would have over the years to come, maybe decades even, playing in the waters of the Atlantic.

Then, unfortunately, she met the ocean, and they did not get along.  

Everything started out great. We ran on the beach, stuck our toes in the sand and sprinted down to meet the oncoming surf. I held my daughter’s tiny hands, and when each wave rolled in, I pulled her up just out of the water’s reach. She giggled furiously with each near miss.  

Until the big one rolled in. Then it was game over.  

I don’t know if I took my eye off the ball or if I just underestimated the size of the wave, but before I could react, a monster wave swept in and clobbered my little girl right in the face. I tried to pluck her out of its path, but it was too tall and too fast.  

She burst into tears. Between the salt water stinging her eyes, sea water up her nose and the sheer surprise of it all, she was done.  Even after getting dried off and comforted by her mom, she wanted nothing to do with the ocean.

Later that day we ended up in the pool by the condo, which was much more of her speed. No waves. No water in the face. Nice and predictable.

Great, I thought. We recovered the day, and tomorrow could ease her back into the beach.  Unfortunately, to get to the ocean from our condo you had to walk right by the pool. And every time she saw the pool, guess what she wanted to do.  

That’s right. We’d driven eleven hours and shelled out good money on a condo so we could spend the week at a swimming pool that was no bigger than our neighborhood pool just a couple of streets down from our house. 

But that didn’t matter to my girl. No amount of bribery or cajoling could persuade her to forego the pool for the sea. She had her mind made up. She’d been burned once and wasn’t going back. 

Maybe you can relate. Sometimes we all have bad experiences in life that make us want to retreat into our safe little pools. 

Maybe you got clobbered by a relational wave. You felt betrayed by a friend, burned by a spouse or had conflict with your kids. The easy thing is to withdraw, give up on the relationship or on people altogether.  

It could also be you tried something risky like going to back school, starting a business, pursuing a dream or sharing your faith with a friend and it didn’t go so well. “Never again!” you said. I tried it once and got a wave in the face.  

Or maybe you got burned by a church or had a bad experience with someone who claimed to follow Jesus. It’s easy to give up on all churches or judge God based on one or two or a whole group of people who didn’t represent him so well.  

Whatever the case it’s easy to let one bad experience shape our future, but when we do that, we’re sure to miss out. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to hide out in my pool, but God called me back out to the waves. 

He’s pushed me to lean into hard relationships, try things I’d failed at again and again and work at things I’d rather give up on. It hasn’t always turned out great, but when I have said yes, I’ve been glad I jumped back in every time. 

Maybe that’s because I learned from my daughter’s example. That tiny toddler turns twenty this year, and now the wave incident is just a funny family story. It’s funny because she got over it. Three years after her wipeout, we finally made it back to the beach, and by this time, she’d moved on.  

She charged gleefully into the ocean, took the waves by storm and has been doing so ever since. A couple of years ago, on a school trip to France, she even got to take a polar plunge into the English Channel. 

You don’t make those kinds of memories hiding out in the pool, and you can’t experience the life God made you to live without following him into the hard stuff again and again.

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