Deep called to deep at the noise of your waterfalls;
all your massive waves surged over me.
By day the Lord commands his faithful love;
by night his song is with me—
a prayer to the God of my life.
Running the Race
If you’ve ever run on the beach, you know that there’s really only a short length of it worth running. Too far inland and the sand is uneven and gives way. If you run at the point just out of reach of the waves, the ground is treacherously laden with spiky crunching shells and debris. You have to run just close enough to the waves where the ground is still solid, but the waves have washed a clear path for you. The relentless pace of the ocean’s waves continue to surge towards your moving feet, and running on the freshly cleared path leaves you in danger of getting soaked every now and then.
Recently, my cousin and good friend, Patrick, has been letting me know how he’s been praying for me. He spent last week at the beach and the meditative pulse of the waves gave him some refreshing insight into God’s grace and forgiveness. What he shared with me I translated into today’s comic strip. God’s grace and forgiveness is constantly carving a clear path. We Wesleyans call this prevenient grace, or grace that goes before we ever make a move. The rough places are made plain, the valleys rise up and the mountains bow down to create level traveling ground. God’s extravagant waves pursue us with grace upon grace, eroding the rocky soil to create a firm foundation for the path ahead.
Your Massive Waves Have Surged Over Me
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not always clear right away that God’s grace is what’s at work. This erosion, what John Wesley called “The Circumcision of the Heart,” can be a slow and painful ordeal. The same Psalmist who is aware of God’s faithful love cries out,
“I will say to God, my solid rock,
“Why have you forgotten me?
Why do I have to walk around,
sad, oppressed by enemies?”
Wesley says “circumcision of heart implies humility, faith, hope, and charity” (Sermon 17, I.2). These characteristics do not magically appear in the believer just because you’ve prayed a special prayer. Rather, they are developed over a lifetime of allowing the waves of God’s grace to consistently smooth out the rough places and clear a path for holy living. For Wesleyans, holiness is not so much about being “right,” having the right ideas, as it is about a way of being in the world: the way of humility, faith, hope, and charity (or genuine compassion for others that leads to action). It is not about an assurance that your future is secure because you’ve checked the right boxes to get into heaven. Instead, it’s an assurance that God is always working on you, in you, through you, eroding the hardened places that remain in you or have grown anew over time.
Because we are perfectly human, we always have room to grow in God’s perfecting love. It is not a sin to be human, to be limited, to be shortsighted or misguided. Our inability to perceive the whole picture is something that makes us different from God. We have a finite perspective, and that necessarily means that we have both much to offer and much to learn. Thus the need for true humility.
Faith and hope allow us the strength to believe that our humility is the true path forward, that God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness. Faith and hope allow us to believe that our failures are not the end of the story, but that God makes beauty from ashes, works all things together for good, and offers countless second chances to be ambassadors for reconciliation in this world. By living in humility, faith and hope, our hearts are transformed to charity, or a realization that we’re all the same in the limitedness of our humanity. Charity is the movement outward, from the overflowing stores of faith and hope, we allow God to use our finite efforts as waves of real and practical grace into the lives of others.
Breaking Waves
I’d like to connect this theological truth to our present reality. We are all weary from the isolation of the pandemic, the vitriol of politics and media, the unrest in our society. I have recently noticed more of my friends and acquaintances posting a sort of “can’t we all just get along” mentality, emphasizing a sort of “I’m leaving you alone so why don’t you leave me alone.” What these folks mean in no uncertain terms is “please stop protesting, please leave my statues alone, please don’t tell me you’re gay, please just play nice and be quiet…in other words, be just like me and stop being like you.” The phrase “all lives matter” is JUST as politically loaded as what is assumed of the phrase “Black Lives Matter.” It’s the cry of someone who wants God to move mountains without doing the work, without allowing for the erosion of what is presently wrong. The protests matter because they expose real problems. If they were not exposing real problems, nobody would care that they are happening. They are leading real people to faith, hope and a movement of charity to address these real problems and take action to make the world a better place for all lives. If all lives really matter, then let people do the work that proves it, let God erode the systems that protect some and harm others. Let God erode the places in your heart that remain hardened. We all have those places. God’s not finished with us yet. Thank goodness.