Deep Calling Deep

I keep to shallows. 
You are the deep 
that tugs my feet 
from under me, 
blasts ears with fury, 
floods each orifice 
until 
I’m swept away, 
my deep imploded 
to a black hole, 
resistance convoluted 
to a vacuum. 
Ravished, 
I find 
your waves and breakers
tender with the
tropic warmth
of a trillion suns,
millenia of moon tides.
You are
epic center,
unfound edge
of everywhere,
and now, 
un-now and if-then
Yahweh!
Waves of worship leap;
the welcome undertow
says “Come!”
I leave the beach.

When the weather heats up, many of us gravitate to water. It may be a cold drink, a pool, a stream, a river, an ocean beach. While we were on mission in Côte d’Ivoire, a favorite retreat for respite was the beach at Grand Bassam in the south on the Gulf of Guinea. Sitting on the sand under the shade of a beach umbrella I would watch the waves roiling in and out, heaving up like a wall when the deep waters would meet the shallows and then crash. The undertow was so strong that swimming was not recommended. We would just soak in the power of the waters.

One day the imagery in Psalm 42 struck me in a whole new way. There the psalmist is lamenting that the a crashing waterfall is overwhelming him while he is in distress in a foreign land:

⁵ Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation ⁶ and my God.

My soul is cast down within me; therefore I remember you from the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mizar. ⁷ Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your waves have gone over me.

 ⁸ By day the LORD commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life. ⁹ I say to God, my rock: “Why have you forgotten me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?”  (Ps. 42.5-9 ESV)

Verse 7 uses the metaphor of the breakers and waves of the waterfull roaring and sweeping over him, like oppression (v. 9)—but in verse 8 the psalmist reminds himself of Yahweh’s hesed, his steadfast love. He grabs onto his prayer song to God, who is the center of his life. He continues mourning that he feels abandoned and mistreated, but ends with this:

¹¹ Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God. (Ps. 42:11 ESV)

That was his source of hope! He needed to remind himself that everything depended on the faithfulness of God.

It is intriguing the way the psalmist alternates lament and reassurance in his conversation with his soul and with his God. He admits that he is overwhelmed by his circumstances, but keeps coming back to confidence in Yahweh. The waves represent chaos, but much more. Let’s go back to the beginning of the psalm:

As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. ² My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God? ³ My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, “Where is your God?” ⁴ These things I remember, as I pour out my soul: how I would go with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude keeping festival. (Ps. 42:1-4 ESV)

He is thirsty for God, the way a deer thirsts for flowing water! He used to be able to praise God while leading singing at a feast day in Jerusalem, and now he was far from home without that fellowship of worship. He feels alone, not only distant from other worshipers but distant from his God. This brings out more water imagery:  he pours out his soul in distress.

One day when I was at the beach, watching the waves crash into foam, that “deep calls to deep” theme began echoing in my soul, and the poem above flowed out. I was recasting the lament of feeling abandoned, and without spiritual support, into the acknowledgement that God was using turmoil in my own life to draw me deeper into union with him. Meeting the All Powerful God, recognizing his majestic “otherness,” can seem like way too much to deal with. Talk about deep waters! As humans we way too often cower on the beach, scared of undertow that could grab us and carry us out into a deep sea where we have absolutely no control. On a literal ocean beach, that is wise. But when we are confronted with the depth of our God and invited to come live in him, inside his depth, our recoil keeps us stranded in the shallows. We don’t trust his goodness or the warmth of his invitation. If we did, we would jump right in and let him sweep us away to wherever he intends us to be!

I’ve mentioned before that realizing this truth was a turning point in my life, back in 1970 at the Urbana Missions Convention when I was 18. I had to admit that I was finding it easy to say stuff like “God is good” and “God is love,” but my heart was actually not all that sure that it was true. Paul Little’s message “Affirming the Will of God” hit me like one of those roaring waves: if I really believed that God is good and loves me, I would gladly say “yes” to anything he would want me to do! And that week I quit avoiding the pull of his work deep inside me. He was making it clear that he wanted me to go wherever he would lead me to share the Good News of rescue in Jesus. Yes, I quit suspecting that he had some nasty plan for me. I threw myself into the deep waters of his love and purpose, and wow has it been an awesome ride!

The best part of the journey has been discovering the intimacy of his Spirit living in me, guiding me and showing me more and more what it means to be wholeheartedly his. I resonate with Paul’s prayer for the Ephesian Christians to experience this:

¹⁶ I pray that according to the wealth of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner person, ¹⁷ that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, so that, because you have been rooted and grounded in love, ¹⁸ you may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, ¹⁹ and thus to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God. ²⁰ Now to him who by the power that is working within us is able to do far beyond all that we ask or think, ²¹ to him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen. (Eph. 3:16-21 NET)

“Filled to all the fullness of God . . . by the power that is working within us . . . able to do far beyond all that we ask or think”! It all comes from Jesus Messiah’s Spirit living in us and revealing to us the immensity of God’s love. Sure, it is more than we can understand, but every little increase in our understanding works in us to shape us. We may not think it possible, but he can accomplish this when we give in wholeheartedly to him.

That would require ceasing to resist the powerful call to jump into the depths of God’s love and live there where we are nourished by it. Then we are able to live out the calling he gives us through his power, not ours!  We are no longer stranded on the thirsty hot sand, land-locked. Instead, he transforms us. Our lives take off in a new direction: his.

Thinking back on the radical changes that came with Pentecost, when thousands of believers experienced being swept into the deep for the first time, it was truly something they had never expected. They still had so much to learn. Some would die for their commitment, like Stephen did, one of the first to demonstrate his trust in God’s goodness and in Jesus as Messiah Savior by speaking truth against the current. Others would find their life paths radically reprogrammed to take the Good News elsewhere. Many would find ways to contribute to Family health that they never expected. Many would be persecuted.

They had much to learn, and so do we.

It may be suffering that Yahweh is using to grab us and draw us into complete surrender to him. That is what Paul experienced when he turned from Jesus-hater to fervent evangelist. Life did not get easy, but he experienced this amazing inner growth and empowerment. He wrote about it to the Ephesians, assuring them that the power working within them “is able to do far beyond all that we ask or think” (v. 20).

The essential entry into that deep ocean of God’s loving goodness is that “yes” that is a leap of confidence into deep waters. The welcome undertow says “Come!”  We may hear it in a season of trouble, but he uses that to speak:  “Just jump into my arms!” Then we live in his unending, majestic world, not just the thirsty beach.