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Bridgewater, July 2010 Savoring
My Passage….acg
As the calendar turns to July, my thoughts find me surfside remembering the once powder white sands
on the Gulf of Mexico and the tragic oil spill that is devastating the lives of the people who live there. I was there first in my twenties while stationed at Maxwell Air Force Base, going there for occasional
weekend rest and recreation. Walking barefoot on the pillow soft beaches was
a sensual delight. Years later the Red Cross would dispatch me to Pensacola,
Florida in the wake of Hurricane Floyd to help with the disaster operation. No
matter the flotsam of destroyed real estate strewn then along the seashore, shorebirds of every variety lived and thrived
after the storm and once again it was a delight to walk the beaches. Now the
sad stories of sea and shore life crowd the pages of newspapers and the internet. The whole scenario is a depressing commentary
of man’s greed and incompetent tinkering with our planet. We are left with
only the recourse to storm the Holy Gates for miraculous intervention to restore the balance of the natural world where again
man’s interference has brought death and ruin.
Rachel Carson, in her landmark book, The Sea Around Us, spoke of
the unknowns of the ocean’s movements and mysteries, of man’s futile attempts to measure undersea currents and
forecast state of the sea waves, countless wave trains, “intermingling, overtaking, passing, or sometimes engulfing
one another; each group differing from the others in the place and manner of its origin, in its speed, its direction of movement;
some doomed never to reach any shore, others destined to roll across half an ocean before they dissolve in thunder on a distant
beach.” Despite the unknowns, oceanographers now predict the Gulf’s
oil spill will eventually impact the beaches of the whole planet. Because of
migration patterns, it is not an understatement to call this disaster a holocaust for shorebirds worldwide.
“And what of the floods of life? What shall we
say of the days which every soul must know when, as Jesus put it, “the rain descends, and the floods come, and the winds
blow and beat upon the house,” until your whole structure of things, all your philosophy of life, is threatening to
come toppling down? What about the happiness’s you build for yourself –
the plans you lay, the dreams you dream, the hopes you cherish, and the heart’s desires you yearn for—and then,
thundering and rolling mountain-high come the waves and the breakers, crashing down on the shore of dreams, leaving only some
poor bits of wreckage behind? Why then, blessed be God, the Lord sits as King
at the flood, the Lord sitteth King forever! Which simply means that the heartbreaking
things of life have meaning and purpose and grace in them, for the Lord God omnipotent Reigneth? There was once a flood called
Calvary. And all the bitterness and ugliness, all the shame and sorrow of life,
entered into that flood, and came beating down around the brave soul of Jesus, sweeping Him down at last to the barbarity
and infamy of the death of the cross. “What can God have been doing?”
we want to ask.”Was He asleep? Or on a journey? Or was He dead?” No! The Lord was sitting as the King
of the flood, that surging flood of Calvary; and out of that grim cross He has brought the salvation of the world. Tell me – if God did that with the cross of Jesus, do you think your cross can be too difficult for
Him to deal with, and to transfigure? He can make it shine with glory. James S. Stewart, in a sermon, “The Lord God Omnipotent Reigneth.”
We must learn to live in the passive voice. Only those who do so, know what it means to live in the active voice.
The fussy activity of the modern man is not life; it is the nervous twitching of his disordered and starved nerves. When animals lack certain vitamins, they will become nervous, jumpy, and hysterical. The rush of modern life is not the calm, poised sureness of mastery. Rather, it is the jumpy hysteria of starved nerves crying out for vitamins of real life. Someone has said that no one commits suicide because he is tired of a lack of life. Jesus put the alternatives this way: “Men ought always
to pray, and not to faint.” It is pray or faint – literally that. Those who pray do not faint, and those who faint do not pray. You can become alive to your finger tips – every cell in your
body alert, active, creative – providing you pray….Pray or be a prey – a prey to fears, to futilities,
to ineffectiveness. E. Stanley Jones,
Abundant Living.
Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God
in Christ Jesus for you.
First Thessalonians 5:16
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