A year ago, I traded in my mountain valley for the seaside, the country for the city. I’d spent my whole life in what was by technicality a rainforest, but only here do I truly feel the rain, cronies of the clouds so covetous of our sun. The rain seems to mock, spitting down at me soon as I step outside – I’d much rather have the rare, commanding storms, heralded like a visiting king with thundering drumtaps and the gleam of a lightning crown. The sky is so often this grey-white infinite, like an empty page I scribe my own life into.
I had spent my whole life in my hometown, and I was beginning to feel trapped in it. The mountains I so loved had begun to resemble altars. Either I was sacrificing something as I mounted them, or I myself was the sacrifice. Retreating to nature was just that – a retreat. When things got bad, I’d seek refuge in the woods, or if things were good, I’d reward myself with them. Each day, I would walk along the riverbank. A week after I flew out, this river flooded, the familiar trail beside it overtaken, and my footprints washed away.
When I moved away, I planned goodbyes with all my old friends, but I hadn’t expected I’d need to say goodbye to God. I knew he wouldn’t be following me here, but this was because I worshipped an omnipresent Lord: He would be here to greet my arrival, just the same.
And yet, I had weaved him so deeply within his creation, and it feels now as though my relationship has been reset. If God is everywhere, I only now test that promise.
Down by the river, I would find myself in prayer, and it was at the rush of the mountain stream where I first communed with God. The creek was barely ten feet wide, and certainly far shallower, but the water carried limitless power, becoming white in its turbulence, a scroll unfolding. This stream was neither pierced nor pelted by the humped and jagged rocks, but rather in waltz with them. The swirls and ripples, the spitting froth – it was more complex than anything I could conceive. Every second, water dispersed and duplicated and conquered and roared, in every square foot its essence constant yet uncapturable. I lowered my hand into the brook, and it bit, its cold relentless. But I held firm. I shaped it in moments, but the path always reconverged, the water in control. I was the one washed in it, replenished and given meaning.
God was not the mountain stream, nor the forests nor the river. He was not them, but they were very much his signature; at times, I admit it is hard to tell the difference. When I had difficulty making friends, I could connect through art, and I believe my relationship with God was just the same. Overwhelmed in group settings, I found closeness one-on-one, and in nature I shared this solitude with him.
In my new home, such intimacy is near impossible. In the mountains, I know I am a guest in God’s domain. But here, the beach is all the city has not yet vanquished, like a flower patch maintained haphazardly in one’s front yard. It is littered with people, stalked by the secular and spiritual. Everyone expects something from the ocean. They bring their new swimsuits, their beach reads, their cameras.
All I am expecting, I hope, is presence.
Even in the night, where solitude carries more of a likelihood, I am just as intimidated by the crowd that is the sea. The ocean is infinite, but at least in this stretch it is all too still. I can swim in it and still be barely in it. I know this ocean is touching everything, breaching everything, but it is foreign to my upbringing. I dive my head below the waves, and I feel I must spit the water from my mouth.
I don’t know what to make of this vastness. I can accompany a stream, walking alongside it, but the sea is too large to know so dearly. I feel like I now see God at the workplace, this new environment where he is distant and commanding. I may accuse him of changing, but I know this has always been him. This is how I support you, I could imagine the businessman saying. If you don’t like it, leave.
We are called to leave our home behind, I know. God has long instructed his people to scatter –when they constructed the tower of Babel, he confirmed the necessity of this commandment. Jesus sent us out to the ends of the earth, but we hardly need his words to know this – humans have an innate desire to wander. It is not to evangelize to people, but to receive from them as well. To receive them in the macro – the culture, the food, the architecture – and the micro – the individual relationships, the street art, the twang of an accent as your name is spoken in a way you’ve not quite heard before. The taste of a new sea.
I am seeing a new angle of God, and it is changing how I know him. It was my old context that first led me to him, and I naïvely expect that dynamic to carry on through new beginnings. Still, if God is in all people, then why must I be alone to meet with him?
To walk on water is to be able to connect these distant lands. Through Christ, I could trek across the ocean to my old home. Thanks to his wind, his breath, I know this is not just figurative. This atmosphere pushes vapors hundreds and hundreds of miles. Surely, in my old home, I’d been tapped by rain from this ocean, and perhaps even here my old rivers drop in. God checks in with a big, wet kiss.
In this water, we are born again.