May your well-being be like the waves of the sea.

After hiking at Pinery Provincial Park and along the Lake Huron shoreline, I have been thinking about waves.  Gentle waves, powerful waves, little waves, big waves, huge waves, laughing waves, waves of tears, how my own breathe comes in waves, and how life is like that too.  Struggles and pain come in waves of two or three or four events in a row.  “Why does everything happen all at once?",  people so often say to me, reaching for the kleenex and crying out with the writer of the biblical psalm:

“Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.” (Psalm 42)

As a child I spend summer vacations at various family cottages south of Kincardine, Ontario. Waves!!!  My mother was the lake, her lullaby the sound of waves at night.  Then I would wake up to listen for the morning mood of the lake.  If the waves were sounding powerful, roaring, and strong – yiiippeeee!  It’s an inner tube day!  Breakfast – fast!  Run down the beach trying to beat my sister and brothers – beatcha to the boathouse! I get dibs on the biggest inner tube!    We would all ride the waves till the sun set and our backs were burned.

Waves, of course, can be frightening.  Like that trip across the St. Lawrence River in our boat, “Amigo”, when every wave was a terror.  We should never have left the Gananoque shore that day. What human arrogance made us think we could manage the waves?  When we arrived on Grindstone Island, New York, where I served a summer congregation, I could have kissed the shoreline rocks. Waves can kill.  Boats get tossed and turned and are never found.  People die in waves.  Waves can wash away lives and cities.  “Never turn your back on the ocean”, said an indigenous man interviewed after the 2004 tsunami in southeast Asia.

There are waves I experience within myself.  Waves of love.  Anxiety comes in waves. Waves of hate. Waves of sorrow. Waves of insecurity. Waves of joy. Waves of gentle acceptance on this beautiful evening in May when I need to take a little walk along the shore of my day and listen to all the waves within the rhythms of my life.   I walk, and imagine all the vast shores in our world tonight.  I hear waves pounding and thrashing, spraying up, washing rocks.  Waves tickling the toes of lovers as they walk along the shore of a new relationship.  Waves washing over pairs of old, aching feet. Lovers who have walked like that together for decades, and decades, and decades.  Waves calming the one who walks alone, reminding them - us -that we are not alone.    Waves that take us to out of control places, up, and up, and wondering if we will make it down, and over.  Dogs barking at waves.  Surfers hunched and waiting, paddling, then up, and sailing in to shore.   I imagine so many quiet places, where only the seals and the penguins and the polar bears listen to the waves. 

I hear now beyond my small doubting world, the sounds and the sights of the ebb and flow of water, of things, of experiences, of the awesome-not-understanding- anything about the one who “appoints the sun to shine by day, who decrees the moon and stars to shine by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar” (Jeremiah 31:35).  

Listen with me, and may your well-being be like the waves of the sea. (Isaiah 48:18)