That time I almost died.

And I had no idea it was happening.

I laid back on the inflatable yellow lounger, closed my eyes, and let the warm sun hit my face. The sound of the water was better than any sound machine. The methodical rocking of the waves under me hugged me like a mother. I dozed off.

It was summer and I was probably around 10. My step-dad had taken me and my older sister to the beach for some fun. I grew up on the Western shores of Lake Michigan, which has so many of the qualities of an ocean: beautiful sunrises, vast horizons, and sand beaches.

That means Lake Michigan also has something else that oceans have: riptides. At 10, I had no idea. But I was about to learn.

I woke up from my little nap to the yelling of my sister and my step-dad.

“Jonny! Jonny!” they screamed, using the name my family called me growing up and still uses. “Come back!”

Come back? I thought. What do they mean? I’m right here.

That’s when I got the thought that millions of 10-year-old boys get: I’m going to prank them.

Even though I had woken up, I pretended to remain asleep. As their yells got more terse, I tried not to smile.

“Jonny! You’re too far! Paddle!”

Paddle? What are they talking about? Maybe I should sneak a peek.

I tilted my head towards shore and cracked open my left eyelid. That’s when it became quite obvious: I was nowhere near the shore. I quickly sat up and looked around. I was several hundred yards away from the beach and I was continuing to drift away.

“Paddle!” my sister and step-dad kept yelling.

I stuck my hands in the frigid water and frantically tried to make my way towards shore.

Nothing.

Not only was I not making progress, I was going the wrong way. I started crying and screaming: “Help me!”

My step-dad started running up the beach to call 911. Around this time he was in kidney failure and on dialysis, so it was physically impossible for him to swim out to me. The Coast Guard was his only hope. But this was an era where not everyone had cell phones, so he needed to find a payphone.

Just as he was running up the beach, a man in gym shorts appeared out of nowhere. He jumped into the water like a torpedo and headed straight for me like an Olympic swimmer. When he reached me, he told me to hold on to the raft and that he had me. He told me to breathe. He held on and dragged the raft away from the rip current and eventually back to shore. I wept as my feet hit the ground and I embraced my sister. My step-dad thanked the man but never got his name. When we fished the yellow lounger out of the water, it was nearly deflated.

Until the day he died, my step-dad claimed two things: First, he genuinely feared that he was going to lose me. Forever. Lake Michigan is frigid, even in the summers, and I was so far out by the time we all noticed it that he thought I was going to die. Second, he believed with every fiber of his being that the man who swam out to rescue me was an angel. He had never seen the man before, he marveled at the man’s strength, and yet he never got his name because the man refused to give it. He also refused my step-dad’s offer to write him a check out of gratitude. Was he an angel? I don’t know. But I’ve never ruled it out.

So why am I telling you all this? Because I came across a quote from C.S. Lewis this week that reminded me of this story. A quote that points out a truth we all need to remember and embrace. If we don’t, we may end up like me at the beach: asleep, adrift, and on the brink of utter disaster. I don’t want that for you.

Here’s the quote from Lewis, which comes from a conversation between two demons in The Screwtape Letters: