Briefly, this:
That when I was young, my church used to go “church camping,” which was about as wonderful and magical an experience as a child could have. But families left and things changed, and then we substituting “church beach picnic” for “church camping,” which was only slightly less wonderful. And while the adults, on the shore, were busying themselves with barbecues and beach chairs and gossip and just being busy, we got to go play. Boogie boarding — as amorphous an activity as it sounds — was the activity of choice back then, and we traipsed through the sand and the dried seaweed out to that roaring, murky, bitterly cold Pacific Ocean.
We were in a bay, and it was mostly safe, although we saw the occasional seal out in farther waters. We fumbled around with our giant foam boards and tried to “hop” onto the crest of a wave and ride it to shore. I wasn’t very good. But it was fun enough to float out in the depth just below our toes, rocking softly in the current, sun on our wet skin.
Every once in a while, though, the bigger waves came, and I was neither experienced nor aware enough to see them. With a little hop, a brief kick of the legs, I’d be on top of a wave that would crash too early, from too great a height.
And, then: the memory is visceral. Suddenly, I was sucked below the surface of the water into a different world. The water was unbearably strong, pulling my legs and arms into a free-falling tumble. An arm or shoulder would hit the sandy bottom — how did I get to be upside down? — and then the water wrenched me another direction. I was lost inside the pull of the current. The noise of the beach, the gulls, the wind was worlds away. My entire consciousness was tumbling, round and round, amid the harsh ribbons of sand and salt in the water. Almost instantly, I had to stop resisting. It was frightening–my mother had warned me repeatedly about the strength of the undertow–but in a way, almost peaceful. The water would take me where it would, I couldn’t change that. I had no choice but to yield, to give up control of my limbs and breath and mind, and to let the water drag me over and around, until it finally pulled me, violently, onto the shore.
And when I think about the grace of God, I think it is something like those waves. There was once a Tuesday night in October when I sat weeping in an armchair, with two women who loved me, feeling truly and utterly forgiven for perhaps the first time ever. And I remembered then, in that moment, the feeling of being lost to the current, the water flooding above me, an unspeakably powerful, even violent, force. I could have sworn those waves washed over me still. An ocean of grace.
Can God be in the violence of the waves? In the terrifying pull and power of the current? I think so. After all: “Course he isn’t safe. But he is good.”
