Ok, it’s time to write. Time to attempt to organize my thoughts into some sort of organized chaos as opposed to the total chaos which is my mind’s current state.

I’m gonna go all the way back to February 12th, at which point I was standing on the deck of a huge ship leaning over the rail staring at the vast black ocean underneath the starry night. I wish I could go back to that moment for just a few minutes and feel the peace and quiet of that moment, well, it wasn’t actually quiet at the time-there were girls shrieking and boys playing basketball on the deck above and i think i recall a crew member telling us it was too windy to be on the deck, but it was quiet in my mind because I have learned the art of tuning out the noise around me when I really want to. Anyways, so in this self-made serene moment, I was completely captivated by the ocean. I’ve always loved the ocean, and always had a sense of respect for it due to the fact that scary stuff lives in it and it is really deep, but it’s been a long long time since I’ve sailed it’s waters at night. It’s amazing. It’s so enormous that you can’t see a sight of land or life no matter which direction you look and in the middle of the night, you can’t see where the ocean becomes the sky so you’re completely surrounded by it, it seems. The only disturbance around is the wake trailing behind the ship which from that point of view seems to be speeding along quite quickly. I know for a fact, it would be a problem if you fell off that ship. You would be gone forever. In fact, anything at all that drops into its waters would be gone forever, swallowed up by the ocean’s waiting bed and buried with the unfathomable amount of trinkets laying on the sea bed thousands of feet below the surface.

Naturally, as I always do when surrounded by the natural beauty of the creation, my thoughts turned to the Creator and I couldn’t help but hum my favorite worship song-How He Loves by John Mark McMillan.

“He is jealous for me,
Loves like a hurricane, I am a tree,
Bending beneath the weight of his wind and mercy.
When all of a sudden,
I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory,
And I realise just how beautiful You are,
And how great Your affections are for me.

..We are His portion and He is our prize,
Drawn to redemption by the grace in His eyes,
If grace is an ocean, we’re all sinking.
So Heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss,
And my heart turns violently inside of my chest,
I don’t have time to maintain these regrets,
When I think about, the way…”

If His grace is an ocean, which it is and more, then we must be sinking. That ocean is HUGE and incredibly deep. If I were to drop something into that ocean off of the edge of that ship, I would never see it again. Never. So why is it that I often feel like I can’t get away from my sins and regrets? If I have truly given them to God, I would never hear from them again. I think we are all holding our baggage over the rail, but not letting go. We’re letting it skim the water, and right when it is being pulled under we pull it back out and let it hang out of reach again, or maybe we pull it all the way back up to us. What’s the deal? How can we get so distressed because our past won’t stop following us when we refuse to simply drop it into God’s hands? His grace is sufficient, the Bible promises us. We are the problem. I would love to have the faith to just let go, put my hand over and open my fingers. Maybe we have to step back wind up and chunk it as hard as we can. But maybe we can’t separate from it. Maybe we’ve held onto it for so long that our fingers can’t part from it. Maybe our only choice is to hold our breath and jump in head first. After all, why would we want to be standing on the deck, with or without the weight of our sins, when His grace is down there, in the water? I’d rather be down there, in the ocean of grace, completely submerged, than standing on the rail clinging to the pieces of my past that I can’t part from. What about you? Will you jump in?