Opposing the Ocean

The ocean is scary. It is colossal. It is deep. It is forbidding. Above all, it is powerful. Few things can compare to it in terms of brute strength. It is able to pull down and crush the strongest of ships. What are we in comparison to it? Insects who ride its waves, while treating it with the respect and fear due it, for if we do not we will be swallowed.

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Man pretends to be strong. He is not compared to the forces of nature. He pretends to be wise. For all his smarts however, he cannot reshape and control nature to his liking. He himself is a product of nature, and is subject to its laws. All he can do is play along, and no matter how cleverly he does he must play by the rules, hoping some greater force does not take him by surprise and claim his life.

This is a grim perspective. However, there is another you can take.

If you choose to continually wrestle the ocean, you will fight a losing battle. You will be dragged under and swallowed up, unless by its mercy you are granted your life again. Those who make this choice will meet only frustration, despair, even death.

But you can stop fighting. You can stop trying to turn back the waves of the ocean – and you can ride them instead.

What is a popular metaphor for freedom? A ship on the sea. I stand on the deck as the wind rushes over my face and blows my hair. I listen to the hissing and crashing of the waves below. I feel the swaying of the boat beneath my feet. I look across the rolling waters and to the seemingly endless horizon before me, and the even mightier sky spreading above, across which rolls enormous white islands of clouds, billowing and shaping as they crawl across the planet. I take a deep breath of the salty air, and I say, “These are the moments I live for.”

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I do not wish to fight the ocean. I do not need to. I have found what true freedom is, and I will not cast it aside in trying to prove something that is not true – that I am a god who controls the waves. We all think of ourselves at some point as Poseidon, commanding the currents, altering the course of the deeps as we please. But if we let go, if we accept the fact that we are the ones who ride rather than direct the waves, there are few things more freeing.

Many of us live our lives striving to be something that God did not intend us to be. We are positive we know what we want, convinced that freedom is to be found in the purposes we set for ourselves. But I speak from experience when I say the things in which we look for freedom are often the very things that will chain up and enslave us, stifling growth, mastering and imprisoning us. But once we accept our circumstances, once we accept who we were created to be, only then can we truly live, only then can we truly find freedom.

If you spend your time trying to force onto your foot a glass slipper that was not molded to it, you will only hurt yourself. If you try to fight the ocean, you will fight a losing battle. God is like the ocean. To fight and control him is to choose madness and death. But to ride on his waves is life and peace.

Psalm 18:26, 27

“With the purified you show yourself pure;

and with the crooked you make yourself seem tortuous.

For you save a humble people,

but the haughty eyes you bring down.”

This does not mean there won't be storms. However, it is an irony that these storms bring us closer to God. During them is when we are most likely to talk to and spend time with him, when during a time of peace we take his love for granted and forget him. It is in our darkest hour, not our brightest, that we cry out to him, that we recognize our need for him. We thank God for times of peace. We also thank God for the times of turbulence, for without these the relationship would quickly die. It is not fun. But it is the very thing that brings us healing and life, curing the numbness we had before been under.

If we want to fight it we will only end up wringing our hands in vexation. Only if we ride it will we find purpose and meaning. So let us not live in denial of the truth, but let us live within it – for if you find the truth, it really will set you free.

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