Holding Back the Ocean

The beach is one of my favorite places. I love the sounds and smells of the vast ocean stretching away like eternity, all the interesting sea creatures, the schreeching gulls, and the soft warm sand. As the weather begins to warm, I start to long for a trip to the beach.

With startling contrast though, the beach also is the source of great anxiety. I know I am safe sitting harmlessly in 6 inch deep water, watching the ocean, but my children insist on playing in it. Do you know how many varieties of certain death exist in and around the beach?

For starters, there are rip tides. Rip tides lurk in any ocean water, hiding themselves in the seemingly placid 5 foot waves, and when the victim least expects it, grabs them by the ankles and yanks them 3 miles out to sea. At this point, ocean danger number two appears. Sharks. These eating machines pay the rip tides big money to catch them dinner, and then they come at you with 10 rows of teeth. If you have ever seen even one row of shark teeth, you know that the definition of "redundancy" should be "more than one row of shark teeth."

Should you survive the sawing in half of your body by the shark's rotating dental daggers, you are encouraged not to swim directly back to shore, or the rip tide will still get you, but to swim parallel to shore for several hundred feet and then consider doggy paddling homeward. Danger number three now blobs into action. Jelly fish. This is almost laughable to be in danger of excruciating agony from something that jiggles and has no brain. I have never been stung by a jelly fish, but from what I hear by those who have been, the pain is similar to stitches without anesthesia or listening to the early rounds of American Idol.

But let's presume your high tolerance to pain allows you to manage to reach the surfline, almost home free.... where danger number 4 awaits. The ocean itself, with those waves that exert enough force to topple skyscrapers. "Waves" is a deceptively benign word, as though there was a pleasant shifting of soft droplets saying a gentle hello to a sun-kissed beach. Nothing could be further from the truth. These so-called waves would be more aptly named "whompers" as they unleash tons of force in all directions upon anything standing in their path. When I worked briefly in the spinal cord unit of Ranchos Los Amigos hospital in L.A., 90 % of the quadripelegics there were from encounters with 'whompers" while surfing.

So every trip to the beach is approached with breath holding anticipation as well as heart stopping angst. Every year I vacillate between utter relaxation and utter paranoia as I "relax" on the soft sand. I can no more hold back the ocean than my worries...but have learned to accept that I can't tame either. What I can do is pray and recognize that very little is in my control anyway and the price we pay for living is eventually death. But the ocean stretching as far as I can see also reminds me that unlike Jesus, I don't have to face death alone nor is it the end in an eternity, and that is the great comfort of the Resurrection.

Job 12:15-16

¹⁵ If he holds back the waters, there is drought;
if he lets them loose, they devastate the land.

¹⁶ To him belong strength and victory;
both deceived and deceiver are his.