Have you ever gone skinny dipping? Lol

Hello there, and welcome to to the Bless Your Mind podcast. I’m Isis, a Canadian living in Sapporo, Hokkaido for 16 years. I work in the media and volunteer at a local Christian Church. I love the people I have met here on my journey in Japan, and I want to keep encouraging as much as possible. Because there are always going to be hard times, but we gotta stick together! Through this English and Japanese podcast, learn some new language phrases. Repeat after me whenever you can. And I pray this can Bless Your Mind!

As summer is coming to an end, I think back on all the days we’ve gone swimming outdoors over the years. Do you like swimming in the ocean, or in lakes? In Canada, I used to live in Ontario, and we have a huge national park called Algonquin Park. Algonquin Provincial Park is massive, covering an area of approximately 7,653 square kilometers. When I was young, I used to go to summer camp for about 2 weeks, boys and girls would split up into different groups with 2 camp counselors. For 2-3 days of those 2 weeks, we would canoe, portage and camp at Algonquin park! The wildlife was incredible, with loons singing over the calm, serene lake.  And at night, I remember claws scratching at our tent. I still hope to this day that was a small animal… maybe a raccoon..? For bigger animals, I saw moose and bears there as well! We had to be very careful about how we handle our garbage, so those big animals stayed far away.

One of my most embarrassing memories was at Summer camp… Have you ever gone skinny dipping? It’s swimming without a bathing suit… so, swimming naked. Maybe in Japan it’s a bit more normal, because we go to hot springs naked. In Canada, I don’t even remember bathing with my parents, so I didn’t often see other naked people. But at summer camp, we thought it would be fun, and thrilling, to go skinny dipping in the lake! So we all ripped off our swimsuits and jumped in. We giggled and laughed, it was fun! Until the boys’ canoe came by… Screaming, we ran out of the lake, into the bushes! The boys laughed and teased us. But you know, the funny thing was, if we had only just kept swimming, they wouldn’t have seen us naked? Because we ran away, they saw us, and we had to hide, cold, behind the bushes. Isn’t that funny? 

It reminds me of Dory from the Finding Nemo movie. She sang “Just keep swimming” over and over again. If only we had done that, we could have avoided all that embarrassment! But there’s a deeper lesson in that simple phrase. Life is full of moments where we might feel like running away, hiding, or giving up. Whether it’s an embarrassing situation, a tough day, or even something that scares us, the key is to just keep swimming. Keep moving forward, no matter how you feel.

In the Bible, Philippians 3:13-14 encourages us, saying,