“I have learned to kiss the waves that throw me up against the Rock of Ages,” said Spurgeon.
I haven’t nearly perfected this to where I can resolutely say that this is something I’ve learned. But it is something I’m learning. And I have a feeling it’ll be a lifelong process. Whether pain, sickness, or crippling depression, I have found that when I am brought to my most melancholy station, I am more receptive to all things spiritual and metaphysical. I have found that when food, thrills, excitement, work, sex, drink, accomplishments, and games all fail to provide that rush of endorphins, I am drawn to something else. Anything else. Something, anything that matters.
A Brief Excursus
As an aside, this seems like this would be a contradiction of scientism — why, after all, would we evolve a directive to pursue that which we cannot see or sense or put in a beaker? Yet most humans do just this, from the most brilliant academics like Paley and Newton to the meanest and most brutish of men on a tropical island in the middle of nowhere.
And it’s not “god of the gaps,” at least for the honest ones. That’s the argument that says that since we didn’t understand how thunder and lightning worked, we chalked it up to any number of deities, including YHWH. No, that’s not really in play here. Rather, it’s more Leibnitzian: a sort of deduction and inference more than anything else. And I find myself compelled to wonder why strictly material creatures made of carbon and various goops consistently adore the unseen. Why we stargaze. Why we worship.
Even the deist Anthony Flew had the courage and intellect to deduce that there is something, or more particularly, someone, and thus deconverted from a life of atheism while being called “senile” for doing so. I may not have the kind of faith that your local “innepennent funnamennal babtiss” pastor has (nor do I want it, for it is likely based on a matrix of idolized, apparent “certainties”), but I have enough faith to say “I reject materialism in favor of something more.”
That “something more” for me is Christianity, and while I recognize that this seems like folly to most (and has to me at times), I take some small measure of comfort in knowing that even its first-century adherents like Stephen and Paul recognized that they, too, were looped into a group of people that was — even then, in their prevailing zeitgeist of superstition and polytheism — considered “a few French fries short of a Happy Meal.”
Anyways
Back to the topic at hand: kissing waves. It is here that I’ll admit that, despite my embrace of at least some degree of liberty and freedom of the human will, I believe that God is constantly course-correcting my life through a series of interventions, many of which are painful. Deplorable, even, by human standards. But oh, our “standards”…how malleable and pithy they are. I have been dashed against not a few rocks of anguish in my brief time on earth, and yet I find myself — though tossed and wandering in the midst of the storm of terrifying doubt and fear of being a fool for this one short life — pursuing meaning in the metaphysical even more. It’s here some would shout “confirmation bias!” and close the case on this, but I don’t believe that’s the driving motivation here.
When thrown down into the pit alongside Joseph and Daniel and Christ, I find myself robbed of all that distracts and inevitably detracts from the God who perhaps meant us to spent a little bit more time in the wilderness (fasting might be tied into this, no?) than in front of a TV or even a book. It’s here that I deconstruct over and over again, zapping bias and security and certainty with a metaphorical laser gun every time they pop up, approaching my beliefs and behaviors from a deliberately antagonistic stance so as to try them and prove them and make sure they pass the test.
Not all of my beliefs do. Many, in fact, don’t. This makes me uncomfortable, and sometimes scared of the implications. It’s already cost me dearly — many churches and friends will have nothing to do with me anymore (that’s not a whiny exaggeration). But it’s worth it and more to not have to live under some illusory comforts of being “right” when that standard of “rightness” is alien to pesky little things called “facts.”
Weren’t you talking about waves and kissing?
I digress too much, I’m afraid. I’ll never be a Challies or Craig; I’ve learned this. I suppose this will end up being something of a public journal. No matter: we’ve got our threescore and ten, and our great-great grandchildren almost certainly won’t even know who we are. I might not even make it until tomorrow. So I for sure am not writing this for fame or some perceived immortality, so it matters not that I’m not the next prolific writer. Just hoping to create a little order out of chaos with prose.
That was another digression, it would seem. So let me sum up: When the despair comes, and when the doubts violently crash into my mind like a tsunami, I sometimes wonder who I’ll be or what suite of beliefs I’ll hold in the end. But somehow — some might say providentially, and ultimately I’m there with them on that one — I bob up to the surface again after being drowned in anxiety and fear for weeks or months or however long that particular storm lasts. After being thrown up against the Rock of Ages, so to speak.
In the end, I think it’s something grand and mysterious — that there’s so much we don’t know about who God is and how he works. But at the same time, it’s not like it’s not in the Bible. Lamentations abound in the Scriptures, and they’re full of people bemoaning their pain and the injustices committed against them, and sharing their feelings of being abandoned by God himself. But in the end of most lamentations in the Bible — and in the end of my own — I find myself looking upward and saying, “My wager is still on God in Christ.”
Because any Rock that was cleft for me is a Rock into which I will most contentedly be thrown.
