Youth Department Address by Sarah Coleman Hornsby, Chair of the Youth Department

My dream of being an Olympic swimmer was shattered at age nine. It was a summer day and my parents took us to Birmingham for a quick trip. We were staying at a hotel with an indoor pool, and when my mother took us swimming, I was thrilled. I was giddy thinking about showing my mother that I should join swim team, that I was a strong and fast swimmer. I started swimming in the 12-foot-deep end, practicing my skills. My brother, age seven, was playing in the shallow end, holding onto the edge. My sister was having a tea party on the stairs, and my exhausted mother was sitting in the corner reading a book.

I called out to her “Mom, look what I can do!” and swam to the end of the deep end as fast as I could. I ended my amazing swim with a somersault underwater. “Oh, that’s great, baby,” she called out as she pretended like she was paying attention. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my brother, holding onto the wall of the pool. “Coleman! Coleman!” he yelled out as he got closer to me. “Can you take me to the deep end? I can’t swim there by myself.” Thinking that I was basically Olympically skilled by nine, I said yes. He wrapped his hands around my shoulders, and I started swimming. We were slicing through the water at what seemed like 50 miles per hour. I was so proud of myself, and my brother was laughing. We made it halfway when my legs started to hurt.

We slowed down, and then we weren’t going anywhere, our heads just barely above the water. And then we sank. My brother, who hadn’t mastered swimming yet, kicked and kicked me down farther from the top. I looked up. I was getting deeper. As seconds went by, I didn’t have the power in my nine-year-old body to get myself to the top. All of a sudden, I saw a splash above me. I saw the outline of blonde hair and Lululemon shorts. Was it an athleisure-wearing angel coming to take me to heaven?

She got closer and closer to me until I was pulled to the surface of the water, gasping for air. She held my brother in one arm while I was wrapped in the other, shocked that I was still alive. My mother, a mere 20 feet away from us, saw us under the surface of the water, and her reflexes from years of swim team kicked in as she dove in fully clothed to save her two not-so-smart children. I didn’t step foot into the deep end for the next year and a half, and never asked my mother to join swim team again.

I believe that today’s reading, Mark 9:14-29, relates a lot to this story. When the father describes how his son acts while he’s taken over by the demon, he explains that the demon throws the boy to the ground. He foams at the mouth, gnashes his teeth, and becomes rigid. This demon had taken over this boy’s body, and I’m sure the boy felt as if he was drowning. He had lost control of his body, lost control of his life. He wasn’t holding the reins to his life. God wasn’t holding the reins to his life.

The demon tried to kill the boy by throwing him in fire or water, and he would send him rolling on the ground. But Jesus brought the boy forward. The demon brought the boy into a convulsion. When it saw Jesus, Jesus rebuked the spirit, and then the boy looked dead. He laid on the ground lifeless and the crowd believed the boy had died. Jesus lifted the boy to the ground and then he was new again. The disciples asked Jesus why they weren’t able to bring the demon out of the boy, and Jesus replied that “this kind can only come out by prayer.”

Many of us get caught up in daily life and start drowning in the balancing act of faith and routines, the overwhelming piling up of things that we are “supposed” to do. We put our relationship with God on the back burner and just try to keep up with life. We start putting in the minimum effort with our relationship with God. Check off going to church on the to-do list and then you are done until next Sunday. I’ve always struggled with prayer and in making it a constant action throughout my day.

When I was in ninth grade, my mother’s cancer relapsed. For the second time she went to her doctor in Houston, and my sister, brother, and I were hopping around different houses, all separately: a different house every week, crashing with friends but trying not to overstay our welcome. This went on for two months. I strayed from God. I prayed and prayed for God to heal my mother and bring her home, but I received no answers. I believed that God wasn’t listening to me, even that God wasn’t real. Looking back now, I see that he used that experience as a way for me to grow our relationship. I prayed that maybe he would listen to me. I prayed deeply and felt helpless. When my mother came home happy and healthy, I knew that my prayers did something. They may have helped heal my mother physically...or not, I’m not too sure. But I know that they healed me. They healed my heart that had turned so bitter.

They turned me towards the one thing that I should have been focusing on. I started incorporating prayer into my daily life little by little. I prayed every time I got in the car. It was the first thing I did when I woke up and the last thing I did when I went to sleep.

I believe that God used this time to flourish my relationship with him and help me realize the power of prayer and a relationship with God. I think that this reading proves how important prayer is in our daily lives. God can only rescue us through having a relationship with him, and the first step in that is to have a healthy and active prayer life. How can you have a relationship with someone that you don’t talk to? Like Jesus rescued the boy from his demon and my mother rescued my brother and me from drowning, God can rescue us from our worries and struggles if we connect with him through prayer.