tossed
During a friend’s birthday weekend at the coast a few years ago, we decided to charter a fishing trip. The excursion started well, but things took a drastic turn when our boat captain decided to take us out from the protection of the bay to fish the shipping channel. Very quickly, smooth waters turned into giant rolling waves coming in from the open ocean. The waves were so big, our boat would ascend far into the air with each one and then rapidly plummet as it passed. This happened over and over again, almost causing us to capsize twice and leaving everyone sick from the volatile motion.
This seesaw experience epitomizes most people’s journey with Christ. Our life of faith consists of moving through a repeating pattern of oscillating between spiritual highs and lows with periodic threats of catastrophe due to the lack of stabilizing rhythms with the Lord through the mundane majority of life.
This was Elijah (1 Kings 19).
After his mountain top experience of defeating the prophets of Baal, Elijah learns Jezebel has threatened to kill him. Despite having seen God do so many wonders, he becomes fearful and flees into the desert, where he asks the Lord to take his life. He was overwhelmed and depressed, and at the threat of personal crisis, he forgot who he was to the Lord.
An angel who visited Elijah while he was in the desert told him, “the journey is too great for you.”
I hear a version of those words often as I listen to people talk about their lives. Without a rooted identity and persistent connectedness to Jesus, the journey of living into the life God intends is too great for us. In our own strength and will, we don’t have what it takes, and therefore need to embrace the habits that form us more deeply in Christ through all seasons of life.
As Elijah gained his energy, he traveled to a cave in Mount Horeb, the mountain of God. Elijah goes to be alone with the Lord. There he’s honest with God about his fear and insecurity, and the Lord graciously speaks to him in a low whisper and reminds him who he is created to be and that he’s not alone. God reorients Elijah and sends him back out on task.
One of the most stabilizing rhythms we should consider heading into a new year is visiting our own Mount Horeb. We need a consistent, scheduled, slowed-down time and place to get alone and honest with God so that we might hear Him speaking. He’s always speaking, but our life motion isn’t always still enough to hear.
Infrequent spiritual highs are not enough to sustain us in the life of faith, especially during times of personal crisis. If we’re not routinely rooting ourselves in Christ through solitude and prayer, we are what James describes as “a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind” (James 1:6).