Staycation, learn from the sea

Summer is here and escaping to an island may not be possible, but escaping from the routine pressures of your job, the traffic, and the everyday ordinary is an option. You can spend a few days on the beach relaxing in the sand with the clear water lapping at your feet and the gentle breeze stirring the palm branches overhead. Ahh!

The scene I just painted in your head sounds like freedom, freedom from the restrictive routines that regulate our everyday lives. Sometimes a change can give us that very needed rest. Take a closer look at that picture, and notice that beach scene is filled with routine, rules, and restrictions. Jeremiah 5:20-25 tells us many things we can learn from the sea. Take a moment and read it with me and see if you don’t hear the same things I did, and maybe more.

Jeremiah 5:20-25 (in Martha’s words). Tell my people to listen to the wisdom of the sea. Learn from her. You see the waves washing on the shore but do not understand. You hear the rolling breakers but don’t listen to what they say. This is what they show you. This is what they say. “Fear the Lord! Do not go beyond the limits of His Word. Live in respect and response to His ways and directions and the seasons will come as expected. The sea understands that and respects the one who put the beach at the water’s edge then drew a line in the sand and said, “don’t cross this line.” The waves try, they wash over the line only to recede again and come back to rest on the seaside of the line. “The sea knows, understands, and fears (respects, reveres, responds to) Me!” But my people do not. They don’t understand, don’t comprehend that fearing Me is for their own good. They resist the boundaries I have laid down for them. They have made their own tsunami by departing from the Lord and not fearing Him.

Fearing God, we may not often think about it and we may not understand it, but it is a good thing. In fact, “the LORD delights in those who fear him,” He takes pleasure in those who understand and respond appropriately to how awesome and powerful and mighty and loving He is (Ps 147:11).

Job gets it. After talking and listening to his friends talk on and on about his sorrows and pain, he hears the voice he has been waiting for. In Job 38 the Lord speaks, and Job knows that God is in charge and he is not. God is just and he is not. The Lord asks Job, in a telling sort of way, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Who told the sea, ‘This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt’? Have you ever given orders to the morning? Do you send the lightning bolts on their way? Do you give the horse its strength?” Ok, ok, ok, Job gets it, he knows that fearing God is wise and right and good. Perhaps taking some staycation time to ponder that would set our minds right again, see the wisdom of the boundaries that the waves do not cross, hear the wind come from nowhere and whip up some whitecaps. Now, tell me again, whose in charge?