He gathers the waters of the sea into jars; he puts the deep into storehouses. Psalm 33:7 (NIV)Master and Maker, I am overwhelmed. I am disturbed and unsettled, and I grumble about the shortcomings of everything and everyone around me. I'm tiresome even to myself. My life plays out on a huge stretch of sunny beach, yet I find myself complaining about the cigarette butts tangled in the seawrack or the dearth of perfect shells. How can I stand beneath the scattered blue wavelengths of atmosphere, looking at forty million square miles of ocean, and be irritable at how hard it is to keep my life under control? Somehow I do it. Lord, have mercy on me.
Sometimes I wander out in your universe and believe myself tipped, turned, and stroking into your deep; I fancy myself welcomed by the leviathan, at home among your frightful pressures and ominous mysteries. Most of the time I'm really only in up to my waist, feeling the tidepull, perhaps, but not really risking anything. True, once in a while one of your great creatures of the deep slips into the shallows and makes itself known, but for the most part I don't know that terror. If I am honest I know that to go where they live is to be stripped of the control I so desire. I can't carry anything with me if I am going to swim past the breakers, and I'm definitely a minor player – a silverling at best – in the place where the water turns from gray-green to black. Lord, have mercy on me.
Today I am undecided. Can I be peaceable on the sand? Do I want to venture toward the deep? Safety is like the grave, and my blood urges me to move, but…
Lord, have mercy on me.
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