I penned this little essay years ago, but I find it oh, so true today, about my pool and my heart.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.  It really did.  A pool.  Oh, not the real, down in the ground, big, expensive kind.  Just a little above-the-ground pool.  To help us cool off in the hot, hot summer.

We’d moved to a new house and I found the perfect spot in the yard for this pool.  We yanked up and out an overgrown, ugly and prolific plant and cleared the place for the pool.  Of course, I didn’t want just any pool, small though it might be.  I wanted a pool that could stay up year round and look nice—the small kind with the wooden frame.

Paul said okay.  My dear husband usually says okay.  Sometimes he lives to regret this.

But a pool is not as simple a thing to install as one might believe when you look at the glossy magazines with the shiny pictures of beautiful blue water inside sturdy and attractive aquatic structures.  First of all, you have to lay a foundation—a cement block—to put the pool on.  This involves no small amount of calculations, mixing cement in the borrowed cement-mixer, pouring the stuff, leveling it off, etc. etc with enough complications to make even the absolutely kindest man in the world (my husband) want to cuss.

Okay, the foundation is laid.  Next step—get the darn thing up.  Not a small task.  But with a husband and two able-bodied teen boys, it happened.  Ah!  After weeks of work (I thought the kit said it would take a day), there it was—our wooden-sided, hexagonal above-the-ground, clear-watered pool!  Delightful!

And I thought the hard part was over (notice that up until this point, most of my help had come annoyingly from the sidelines). 

Boy, was I wrong.  You see, a pool requires lots of upkeep.  There are all kinds of complicated things you must do to a pool.  You have to calculate the Ph, you have to fill it with products to keep the water pure, you have to buy a vacuum to clean the bottom of the pool of leaves and dirt, you have to make sure the motor runs properly.  When you look at the manual—which goes on for pages and pages—it seems the rest of your life will be spent in the upkeep of this pool.

But finally all the preliminary steps have been taken and ah, you jump in the freezing water and enjoy!

For us, this joy lasted all of about two weeks.  That’s when we noticed that the stuff on the bottom of the pool was not coming up very easily and the vacuum seemed impuissant.  The pump did not seem to be working correctly.  Soon the pool was downright dirty.  And then, horror of horrors, it turned green.  A very ugly, algae-covered green.  And even though that thick manual said that all you had to do was restore the Ph balance and throw in a bunch of liquid—what the manual called a ‘shock treatment’—this did NOT work.  The pool remained a lovely green despite our best efforts.  Ever-patient-Paul was truly losing his cool, especially since HE was the one who was supposed to have divine knowledge of how to keep the pool clean.

Finally we did what any sensible pool owner would do.  We emptied the whole tub of its rotting water.  We had no choice.  Little by little we watered our lawn with the algae-infested liquid.  The lawn seemed to like it.  At last, after two days, the pool was empty.  So we started filling it back up.  Of course, all of this occurred during the hottest part of the summer and instead of bathing in the pool, we were scrubbing green scum off the sides of an empty container at five a.m.

We filled it again—at no small cost to our budget—and for a while, we truly enjoyed the pool.  But a while was a very short time—like a week…  We finally decided that the pump was faulty and we needed to send it back—under guarantee, of course.  However, we’d have to wait at least 3 weeks to get the replacement pump.  Delightful—should we simply give up and not use the pool for three weeks?

And so the saga continued and gave us many a chance to grit our teeth or cry or cuss.  And the wooden siding did not weather well.  Nothing about the pool was as easy as it seemed.

As I gaze out this morning, two years later, at the once-again green pool—despite a new pump and all the right products put in at precisely the right time, I have only one recourse besides tears and curse words:  a simple analogy.

This pool is so much like the human soul.  Ah, a spiritual analogy at that!

We humans generally want to look good on the outside, so we try to choose the right covering for our bodies—in-fashion clothes, nice hair-style—equivalent to the wooden frame of our pool.  We don’t ask to be glamorous, not that big fancy pool.  Just in style.

But the outside doesn’t really cover up the inside and without faith, the wooden siding is empty.  Sometimes we try to construct our lives with an attractive outside without ever putting down a firm foundation.  This is disastrous.  The structure is uneven and sags.  When we find faith, at last!—what joy.  But pouring the right foundation takes wisdom.  If not built on Jesus, it will not stand.  So we take the plunge, the first step, we believe and the foundation is laid.

The Lord fills our ‘pool’ with His sweet Spirit and at first, it all seems so absolutely refreshing and pure and clean and delightful!  Our soul is clean!  We are forgiven!  Life will never be the same!

Not far along in the Christian life, we realize that this ‘pool’ is going to take some upkeep.  Otherwise, the pure waters will get dirty quickly—dirty with little sins.  So we learn the formula—attend church once a week and stay clean.  It seems simple enough—only it doesn’t work.  Even with the good input of products of preaching and prayer, the human pool gets dirty if left alone during the week.

So we add an essential step—reading the Owners Manual.  Ah yes!  Reading the book and then praying—it’s like letting the vacuum tube clean out the residue on the bottom of the pool.  This formula works pretty well for a while.

But one day, horror of horrors, we awake to algae in the bottom of the pool.  Green stuff.  Accumulated sin.  We’d been going through the steps, trying to be sincere, but as we go to the Owner, and humbly ask advice, we see several problems.

First, we only skimmed over the manual.  When it got too complicated—talking about Ph control with logarithms—gasp, I studied that 30 years ago—well, we tend to skip over it a bit and just do what has always worked.  And the algae starts growing.  God wants a pure pool and sometimes, if we are to mature in our spiritual life, He allows the scum to come in so we’ll turn to Him for a solution.

Sometimes the pump just isn’t working—the filter has to be cleaned with confession, with reconciliation, with tears and abandonment.  Sometimes the hose from the vacuum to the pump is clogged.  Often as I am trying to vacuum our pool, I realize the hose has simply come detached from the source.  No wonder that pesky leaf won’t come off the bottom.  In my life in Christ, I can easily detach myself from the Source and just float around on my own, trying to rid my pool of sin through my own feeble efforts. 

This is useless.  In pool terminology, it just stirs up the water and the green stuff on the bottom infests the whole pool and it is murky and dark and unpleasant.  Sometimes it even smells bad.  So we have to clean the filter, get the hose attached to the vacuum, make sure the pump is working at the right speed.  At times, it can seem exhausting, controlling this spiritual life.  At times, all our best efforts of reading the manual thoroughly and cleaning and products—following the instructions carefully with prayer and praise and reading—it still just isn’t getting us anywhere.

This happened in my pool-life this week.  So I did what any desperate woman would do.  I complained to my friends—two who had similar small pools.  “Am I just stupid?  Does everybody else’s pool always stay clean?”  In desperation, I admitted my complete lack of ability to keep the pool clean.  And oh, the truth!  Misery loves company and company I got!  They too had had awful experiences with their above-the-ground pools!  This was actually comforting.  After complaining awhile, they shared advice and I found some new ideas to try.  I felt less like a failure.  I was encouraged.

Our souls need the encouragement of fellow Christians.  Sometimes when we are stuck in our Christian lives, the best place to go is humbly before another ‘pool’ owner and beg for advice.  Prayer and laughter and tears and encouragement work wonders in the upkeep of the ‘pool’ soul.

But sometimes, no matter what we do, it’s still green.  So we try the shock treatment.  We put our whole body and soul into begging the Lord to do something in this mess of our life.  We fall on our faces before Him and cry, admitting we can’t and begging him to intervene.

Oh, how I wish that living for Jesus was as simple as a formula that always works.  Or do I?  When I look back on all that has been good and profound and worthwhile in my life, the most refreshing times have come after the pouring out of myself, after the humbling and the tears.  After the total emptying of my pool.  Every once in a while, this is the only solution that works.  And then He fills us anew with the fresh pure water of His Spirit and we begin again.

I’ve learned a lot from my physical pool. Daily maintenance—vacuuming the dirt, cleaning out the filter—weekly treatments, and sometimes drastic measures—calling for an in depth reading of the manual and perhaps a total emptying of the water.

It is time-consuming to be filled with God’s Spirit.  Hard work, but oh, the benefits when we, at last, enjoy the cool refreshment of His grace. 

Where do you need a little shock treatment today?

ELIZABETH MUSSER writes ‘entertainment with a soul’ from her writing chalet—tool shed—outside Lyon, France. Find more about Elizabeth’s novels at www.elizabethmusser.com and on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and her blog. +