Wave

The ocean amazes me, and when I say amazes I mean AMAZES. The first time I saw it this summer I seriously stood at its shore for a good half hour in pure awe saying, “God you are amazing…whoa.” Just think, when I looked across I was looking at another continent… technically. That’s nuts! This huge creation pulled me like a magnet. I stepped foot in it almost everyday this summer, ran barefoot along its beach, almost died in it multiple times (disregard this Mom), saw animals big and small…brought home a couple (RIP Jeff the hermit crab), and took home enough shells to fill a bucket.

Yet, the thing I loved about it most was what God taught me through it. God’s creation is the greatest teacher. Go to class – it’s outside your door.

Lesson1: Every time I was at this huge, magnificent, powerful creation I was overwhelmed by the thought that, “God created this mind-blowing ocean, yet, calls me his most beloved.” Me – this disobedient often bratty child of his.  I don’t see the ocean disobeying him: “Even the wind and the waves obey Him!” -Matthew8:27. Pure grace.

“What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet:  all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild, the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas. LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”

Psalm 8: 4-9

Lesson 2: Each wave in the ocean is different. Each is unique like a fingerprint or snowflake. Yet, whether big or small they all rise up into this gorgeous curl. As a wave rises and grows stronger, the water in front of it is getting ever lower and lower until that wave starts to curl over it and envelopes it. After a morning run with God on the beach I was listening to Leeland’s song “Weak Man” and the chorus is:

May I be low, low, low, so you’re made higher
May I be low, low, low, so you’re made higher
And I’ll be weak, for you are strong, weak, for you are strong
In the weak man

I love God so much. Right there in front of me He was teaching me a lesson about myself. Like the water in front of the wave, the lower I am, the higher the wave,Christ, is. Low meaning not trusting in my own power or my pride, but in Christ’s and the Holy Spirit’s in me. Every time I have trusted in my own power and pride it has crashed and burned. I don’t want any glory to go to me, I want it to go to Him! The wave rises and becomes stronger as the water below it continually gives itself to it. Then, the wave, though powerful, lovingly and beautifully curls over the water – envelopes it. This is what Christ does. When we continually give our trust, our struggles, our selfishness, our pride, our life to Him, He will curl over us in love, envelop us in his grace. In our weakness He makes us strong. We are filled and complete in Him. He is the wave that obeys his Father, and He is taking us along with — to heaven’s shore, where we will be home at last.

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

2 Corinthians 12:9-10