Sometimes It’S Better To Avoid Bridges

Bridges and water seemed to metaphorically fill my week.

It began with two stories I told during a speech at the Spokane YWCA. The silly first story began with three men trying to decide how to get across a wide and tumultuous river. It ended with the third man finding a bridge to cross.

The second story focused on four women standing on a riverbank watching children helplessly floating by.

One women pulled children out of the river. Another taught children to swim.

A third organized other people to help the children. The fourth went upstream to see who was throwing children in the river in the first place.

Later in the week I listened to a fine speech that included a poetic reference to building a bridge over a deep chasm, then building bridges to the future. Later that same day, as mayor of Sandpoint, I met with the City Council and department directors for a workshop to begin imagining what the city could look like in 20 years.

The bridge-to-the-future metaphor was used in some direct or implied way there, too.

Then I saw a news photo of London’s new Millennium Bridge, a multimillion-dollar footbridge just opened to its first pedestrians. Some were woozy from their experience because the bridge was designed to move laterally a little in the wind.

It’s been closed indefinitely to fix the problem.

Now, how do I bridge between the metaphors and the real-life point I want to make? Guess I’ll just jump in and see how the water is.

Bridges are very useful contraptions when they make life more convenient and when they keep us from dangerous situations. Bridges can also be unintentional escape routes when they keep us above the life situations we want to avoid but need to engage.

I’ve been a fan of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” since it came out 31 years ago. A great song!

So with apologies to S&G’s fan club, I need to say that a bridge over troubled waters may not always be the best answer for dealing with life. On occasion, it’s time to sing and live out the old spiritual: Wade in the water, wade in the water, children.

Wade in the water, God’s gonna trouble the water.

It is important to know when to bridge a chasm and when to make your way down into the canyon and cross at the bottom.

You might recall that the psalmist says, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. …” He didn’t speak of walking over that valley.

There are times when life is enriched by not taking the bridge, by not wishing for a bridge to magically appear. The water may be turbulent or calm, dangerous or innocuous. It is still water.

Consider the life-giving capacity of water. Remember how Jesus talks to the Samaritan woman about “living” water? His words engage her imagination.

She recalls how liquid water not only refreshes the parched tongue but does something mysterious to keep the body healthy. What she doesn’t get easily is the connection he makes between drinkable water and the life-giving refreshment of God’s spirit running through her body.

In the conflict transformation training I do, one distinction I try to make is that we can sometimes resolve a dispute but the underlying conflict will remain. Metaphorically, it may look like this:

The bridge we construct between another person and ourselves is the resolution of a dispute we have with each other.

We may even meet halfway on the bridge and “agree to disagree,” immediate dispute resolved.

But below us, a short distance or deep down, the conflict still remains. It may be a raging river of fear or a trickle of misunderstanding.

But if we stay on the bridge and never venture down together to face the conflict, it is still in control of our lives. It continues to deform us.

We never allow the living water inherent there to help transform our relationship, not to mention our individual spirits.

Sometimes life on the bridge is an important time of respite. But there usually comes a time when testing out the water is the only way to get the full benefit of God’s love and life-giving power.

Look for that crucial time when involvement in life means stepping off the bridge and wading in the water.

God may have troubled the water. That also means God is in the water ready to swim with you to wherever you need to be.