My friend and former pastor John Ed Mathison put me on to a story I hadn’t seen before. A 31-year-old man, Jerome Moody, drowned at a swimming pool party in New Orleans in 1985. The party was a celebration by the New Orleans lifeguards of a summer swim season in which there had been no drownings. You can’t make this stuff up. Here’s the way the New York Times reported it at the time:

A guest at a party for lifeguards celebrating their first drowning-free swimming season in memory drowned Tuesday, the director of the New Orleans Recreation Department said today. Madlyn Richard, the department director, said the body of Jerome Moody was found on the bottom at the deep end of a department pool as the party ended. She said Mr. Moody, who was 31 years old, was not a lifeguard, but four lifeguards were on duty at the party. – A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 2, 1985, Section A, Page 7 of the National edition with the headline: Victim at Lifeguards’ Party. 

John Ed’s take was something like are we too busy celebrating our success to be doing something significant? Another perspective is this: are we paying attention? And do we have a bias for action?

• Are we sitting in church, enjoying the service, thinking what a fine church we have, while the person sitting next to us or in front of us is drowning in a major life crisis?
• A friend of mine said to me recently that he was disillusioned with his church, and I didn’t even take time to pursue that. (I’m going to try to remedy that one.)
• How are our neighbors doing? Have we asked?

Look to the right and see: there is none who takes notice of me; no refuge remains to me; no one cares for my soul. (Psalm 142.4, ESV)

As he passed by, he saw a man… (John 9.1, ESV)