Whaling

There is this commercial, for some kind of insurance agency, that has a beautiful whale exploding from water, and somehow the sight of that water and that whale convinces audiences to trust in the insurance agency. I never thought about it much before, but I wonder if that isn't somehow significant. Maybe this agency is on to something, and maybe that something is the idea that people are drawn to the reality of the beauty of whales and created things, simply because they are undeniable artifacts of life. There is a truth to the idea of beings existing with or without our notice, and they go on living, and have lived, since before we were conscious of them.

Mom read me a quote from a book she read over the break, something about how most times people who know God act as if He is some great depth that they must only venture into a few times in a day, and that the shallow portion of life is where they most often ought to remain. The truth, Mom told me with glittering eyes, is that God has invited us to spend most of our time in the deep place with Him, only venturing into the shallow portions when it is necessary. Somehow it all connected in my brain to this whale. People pay a lot of money to go whale watching, and they go for a few seconds, maybe mulitple times, of a whale's surfacing. But they never leave the watch thinking, "Geesh, I wish whales spent most of their time above the surface...that way we'd really get a good look at 'em."

The glory of a whale is that the surface is NOT its home. It makes it surfacing all the more exquisite, shocking, undeniably loud for the watching world. How often I live like I can only handle so much depth, and that the world watching me needs me surface level. What if we, who profess to know God, mimicked those glorious kings of the sea? What if we lived in the deep places of God, and only momentarily broke the surface, to wow and convict and convince the watching world that our glory depends on the fact that we are not surface-level. We go deep. Oh Lord, let me go deep.