God's art of overwhelming

Here, in the summer, I go to the beach frequently. Growing up in landlocked Austin, TX makes the waves a novel experience for me, still, and I love that I can hop on a ferry or train and spontaneously find myself somewhere completely different from the city streets I’m used to.

I love being thrown back in the waves, even as you stand defiant against them and try to dig your heels into the sand. The silence when your head slips underwater, the foamy salt that clings to your lips, the darkness, and the feeling, for a second, that you can’t breathe and you can’t stop moving and you are completely at the mercy of something stronger than you. When you resurface, and another wave drags you quickly back under, and you feel sincerely a flicker of fear, and then your toes find the bottom and you propel yourself towards the shore as quick as you can, with the weight of wetness working against you and the world seeming white, dizzy and overwhelmed.

Those moments, gasping for breath, are my favorite part of the beach. My lungs are greedy for the breath of God and I stand there, taking it all in, sandy, skinned knees threatening to buckle with the coming tide. 

My friends wave me back to the blankets. 

I shake my head, wet hair stuck to my neck, and run back out to dive back in. 

There is rest in the thrill. There is calm in powerlessness. My heart pounds as I’m confronted by my own weakness, by the power of everything around me. Even the blood on my knee seems impossibly red, vivid and beautiful. 

Psalm 104 is one of my favorite worshipful psalms, which considers God as a great artist and takes in his massive artworks. It makes me think my version of throwing myself into the overwhelming ocean is Biblical. Consider verses 24-26: How many are your works, LORD! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. There is the sea, vast and spacious, teeming with creatures beyond number— living things both large and small. There the ships go to and fro, and Leviathan, which you formed to frolic there. 

The psalmist contemplates a great and terrifying sea — even a great a terrifying sea monster! — and praises a God who is greater still. 

When your soul needs beauty, put yourself places that remind you of your smallness. There is nothing so great as being overcome, whether it’s craning your neck to look up at the beautiful architecture of the city, or shivering so hard that your teeth hit each other, or swimming against an ocean that will toss you as easily as if you were a grain of sand. 

This is what it is to engage in the artwork of God, the message of creation; We are small. And when we are overcome, there is a kind of truth that sings out in our bones, and I can’t get enough of that feeling.