Breathing in the Sea

Pictured below is the piece of art I made to commemorate my Yellow House experience, which was hung on the living room wall (slightly crookedly) just in time for our final house show/Goodbye Party last night. I’ve always wanted to be artistic, but I’ve never really experimented with it until my time here at the Yellow House. Since my most notable creative accomplishments this year have been my feeble attempts at string art, I chose to use that medium for this reflection piece.

I should probably note that I see life as a journey and God as an ocean. I am a sailboat gliding across His sea, and His Spirit is the breath in my sails. Maybe it’s because of the small fisherman town I come from or the fact that my childhood home was right on the Bay; maybe it’s because I taught sailing for two joyful, magical summers and fell in love with the complex simplicity of it; maybe it’s because I resonate with the idea of a powerful, moving, deep, mysterious, and ever-changing yet ever-steady presence; there’s something about the ocean--the water and wind and wide open space--that connects me to God.

Maybe that’s why I have such a fear of drowning.

Eighteen months ago, suddenly and shockingly and with plenty of warning signs, my boat capsized. I’d like to say there was a huge storm or some massive spiritual attack against me. While that may in fact be true, I have come to suspect the fault might also have been due to my own user error. Whatever the case, I found myself submerged, clinging tightly to an ancient mast, trying desperately to keep my head above water, waiting for God to save me and resenting Him when He didn’t. I knew I couldn’t hold on much longer, and if God was an all-good and all-powerful and all-loving being, I believed He would catch me even if I fell. So somewhere in the midst of all that fear and hopelessness and depression and chaos and anger and doubt, I made a decision:

I let go.

And to my horror, God didn’t catch me.

I drowned that cold November night in Chicago. I gave up on God, I gave up on Christianity, and I especially gave up on the church and the people who proclaim to follow this religion. I called Him a selfish fucking bastard and hated Him for abandoning me. And then I slipped into the deep, beneath the waves, and died in the darkness.

What I didn’t understand then is that God was in the ocean. I’d forgotten the deep magic that governs all of creation, the paradoxical beauty of a world where things have to die in order to truly live, where the One who created it and who breathed life into the black waters I found myself in also designed it all for the purpose of one thing: resurrection. And I especially didn’t realize that He didn’t need my permission to resurrect me.

The Yellow House has been my resurrection. I know; it sounds so dramatic and glamorous when I say that, but the truth is almost embarrassingly the opposite. This hasn’t been a luxury cruise liner; it’s been more like a piece of driftwood that floated past at the perfect moment; a life ring thrown by a perfect savior. There have been problems and painful moments mixed in among the indescribably good ones. I still struggle for breath. There are days I still feel like I’m fighting off drowning, and I’m often terrified of what dangers might lurk in the deep.

But you know what? It’s enough. I’m alive. I’m breathing. I may not yet be sailing on voyages to distant waters, and I may not yet be climbing mountains or shouting from the rooftops; I may instead be lying here half out of the water in the middle of nowhere with no idea what to do, clinging stubbornly to hope and barely breathing.

But for someone who used to be dead, those words are a miracle. For someone who once drowned beneath the depths, to find myself breathing again at all is an unexplainable gift.

For so long, my faith was in the power of my boat to protect me. As long as I did the right things, said the right things, or believed the right things, then the boat would save me from any storms that came my way. Even when I deconstructed all of that and fought against everything I had been taught, the only thing I actually succeeded in doing was building myself a different boat with a different set of rules (albeit ones that may be a bit more in line with Jesus’ teachings). So when my boat capsized, clearly my faith did, too; if even my new and reconstructed understanding of Jesus’ Kingdom of beauty failed to be effective in the real world, then how could I trust any part of what He said? And why would I even want to? From that point onward, my faith was placed instead in the power of the storm: the certainty that it was strong and deadly and unbeatable, that life was meaningless and that God had no power.

But if the Yellow House has taught me anything or reaffirmed anything I used to know, it’s that there’s always a third way. It’s neither the boat nor the storm that deserve my faith; my trust is in Jesus, who is safer than any boat and stronger than any storm. As many times as I’ve had to learn it (and as frustrated as I’ve gotten with nominal Christians who live this way in the past), there is so much more to Jesus than simply a religion; He isn’t a boat, easily contained within its walls so long as we live the lifestyle we believe He wants. Instead, He is a God who is unconcerned enough about the boat to sleep beneath its benches, and who is unconcerned enough about the storm to subdue the seas upon waking.

In light of this revelation, mere survival isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be, because then one is tempted to give credit right back to the boat and miss out on the reality of what God is truly like. Sometimes it’s better to lose yourself to the water in order to be reborn to the spirit; to let yourself die in order to experience the power of resurrection life that a loving God promises to all of His creation.

So here’s my story: I used to be dead and now I’m alive. I used to be lost and now I’m...well, I’m still lost, but I believe that I am in the perpetual process of being found, day by day. One day soon, things will be more than “just OK.” It may not be tomorrow. It may not be next week. But I cling to the hope that before too long I will wake up in my bed one morning and realize that my life is beautiful and good and whole, that I am not struggling for breath, and that I am not terrified of monsters in the deep. I will be able to sit back at the dinner table, surrounded by good friends and with a belly full of good food, pleasantly exhausted by a day full of good work, and know that God has surely provided all of my needs, and I will be satisfied. I’m not there yet; but I can feel the wind tugging at my sails, and the water stirring beneath my feet. I know that the day is soon approaching if only I will pay attention; not to do it or to earn it or to build a new boat around it, but to rest in His grace and know that it is enough. Jesus is enough.

God has saved me, and though I might not fully know what I’m doing or where this journey will take me, I know His restoration and resurrection power have done their work in me. I have a community of beautifully broken souls alongside me who show me what it means to love and be loved, who walk with me through troubles and who have carried me through many a storm of their own. Together, our joy is multiplied and our grief is divided, and with them I have found hope again. These are the waters I sail now. One day, maybe soon, I will venture back to my homeland, but for this moment, it’s enough to stay in this place, to catch my breath once more, to trust, to hope, to dream, and to live.
 

And for that, I will be forever grateful.

May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you
Wherever He may send you.
May He guide you through the wilderness,
Protect you through the storm.
May He bring you home rejoicing
At the wonders He has shown you.
May He bring you home rejoicing
Once again into our doors.

Amen.