Treasures of the Deep

Life is kind of like playing in the sand at the ocean. You pile it up in some places, smooth it down in others, and dig trenches, focusing all of your attention on building the vision in your mind. You pat the sides of your castle firm, then cup your hand and draw it down through the surface of the beach, and before long, something new – water – fills the empty space you created.

The tide advances, inch by inch, until with the arrival of one enthusiastic wave, your masterpiece is gone, with perhaps only the barest lumps left.
Was it only a memory or did it really exist? For a moment of your life, or perhaps many, that thing was all-consuming and all-important. But then another moment sweeps in bringing change, and that which consumed you is now a memory. Ready-or-not, here’s another new phase.

Stopped by the sudden difference, you look at what the ocean stole from you, but you can’t be really shocked; it’s the nature of the ocean, the risk you take when you craft something in a place over which you have no control. It’s the unavoidable risk of living, period. We spend our days and moments focusing, building, crafting by faith in a world where we have little control over what happens, no matter how hard we might fight to grasp it.

We can see what the waves steal from us and moan over what was lost, or at the very least irrevocably changed, or we can appreciate that there is always more material to work with and find hope in the never-ending resources at our disposal. We can fear the power of the waves or marvel at the gifts of beauty that they draw towards us from the depths.

Eventually, if we gain enough wisdom, we come to realize that whatever can be disintegrated by the ocean waves is not what is important anyway. Our work in the sand castles of life is necessary, but the reward is not the shifting structure itself; there are eternal values behind the temporal work, and that is where the real treasure lies.

It is a lesson I desire to master: how to live for what is eternal and not the comfort of the present. My tendency is to put value on the tangible goals that I can check off a list. If I accomplish those tasks, I feel successful. If not, I am “behind.” But the realization is (s-l-o-w-l-y) dawning on my heart that God, and perhaps (of course!) His invisible kingdom is not something that can be itemized and checked off. If God is relational, which of course He is, our closeness to Him cannot be boxed in and completed alongside the grocery shopping. It’s more nebulous and uncontrollable than that – like water, not sand.

So then, the question becomes this: how to we get from our checkbox religion to a relational experience of the new life that is hidden in Christ? Understanding this concept feels to me like trying to grasp the ocean. But let us consider: what is the most up-close and personal way to experience the ocean?

To be immersed in it. To let It surround Us, instead of Us trying to capture It. We will never be able to experience as much of the ocean if we are trying to cup it in our hands with mushy wet sand from the edge of the shore – the eternal mixed in among the temporal – as if we dive into the waters and allow ourselves to feel the power of the waves. In the same way, we must allow ourselves to be encompassed in the Presence of the Almighty, surrounded and pressed in upon every side by Him.

If we ask God to align the desires of our hearts with His and dive deep into the ocean of His presence through prayer and thoughtful study of His Word, the sand-castle work that we do on this earth will be tied to a deeper, eternal purpose that will withstand the test of fire when we stand before God one day. Then, when those ocean waves come, sweeping change into our lives, we will find among the difficulty the treasures of the deep to carry with us, lasting reminders of the faithful God who ordains our days.