“For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge and the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” Habakkuk 2:14
Oh, Peace
Myra Stull
Oh peace which like a mighty river
Swells 'round my ankles in the sand,
And the righteousness which surges
As waves from sea upon the land.
Mercy, vast, and undeserved,
But God gives with days anew.
For us, the Savior died,
To make sinners heirs of truth.
I'm not a swimmer.
Don't get me wrong: I love water. I could sit on a dock for hours at a time, leaning against an old, weathered post with a book in my hands, or gazing out at the distant horizon. I love a dead log perched across a stream where I can sit and dangle my feet in the water. I catch crawdads in creeks; I've had mishaps with farm ponds. I've been boating on lakes.
I fall asleep dreaming of the sound the ocean makes as it laps against the shore.
But I'm not a swimmer.
I've had lessons: but I didn't like them. I'll splash around in a pool and swim from point A to point B behind the back of the boy listening intently from his position on the diving-board, ready to spring if I don't move fast enough. I can hold my breath for a relatively long time. I can tread water. I can swim if I have to.
But the ocean scares me - and not just in a physical way. It puts an unexplainable fear in me, as if its beauty overwhelms its power, while at the same time its power overwhelms its beauty.
It is a surging mass of the worst way to die. It cannot be bridled and it cannot be contained; it is wild. There is nothing predictable about the ocean, while at the same time there is something so incredibly constant and stable, for the tide will always go in and always flow out. The lapping against the shore is like the calm ticking of a bomb that could explode at a moment but, nonetheless, lulls you into sleep.
Sink your toes in the cool sand; close your tired eyes; listen to a seagull cry and the motor of a boat off the coast sputter; let the sunlight beat down on your head or the drizzling rain fall on your body.
But there is something that terrifies me about being within that body of water - because I'm not a swimmer.
So often I hear the grace of God explained as if it were an ocean, because in our finite minds, the ocean is the most vast and magnificent thing that we can compare to grace. God’s grace is so unexplainable, even though we tirelessly study to find a way to explain it.
Grace, like the ocean, is unexplainable and overwhelming in its power and in its beauty.
I was recently urged to let the mercies of God be my motivation in life, replacing the motivations of guilt or shame. I was urged to plunge into the knowledge that all I am is because of all He is.
And I was told that once I knew this, I would be able to swim in that ocean of Him being my all in all for a very long time. God's ocean of grace would be my motivation for a long time. I could dog-paddle in those waves for a couple hundred years.
But something is wrong with that.
I'm not a swimmer.
And wouldn't swimming imply that I was doing something in that ocean that was by my power and my ability?
I am a debtor to grace!
I flounder around in it; I splash and it gets in my mouth; I sink and it covers my head. I try to begin to swim and the current pulls me under.
I am daily drowned in the ocean of grace.
I cannot even swim in it.
God knows that I can't even breathe when his mercy fills my life, because it covers me and it suffocates anything that I would want. If I am drowned in his grace, then I am killed.
And if I am killed, then I am dead.
And if I am dead in God's ocean of grace, it means that the old man has slipped away in the current and the new man in immersed in glorious waves of grace and mercy. The new man is washed clean. The new man begins to flounder around.
But I can't swim. Not even then, as a new creation.
I can only be submerged in the cleansing water, and in that water I flounder and drink, and in that water where my sinful wishes are constantly being suffocated, I truly live.
