Setting Boundaries

This week, my wife Vicki, daughter Sarah and I are at the beach. I often joke that I know God wants me to live on the beach, but for some reason He hasn’t yet provided the place! I even think about what it would be like to be the lawn maintenance person at the condo complex where we spend a week each summer in return for a rent-free place to live.

Sunday, we attended an open-air worship service just across the street from the beautiful St. Joseph’s Bay. If I knew the bishop for the northern district of Florida for the United Methodist Church, I might get my name on the list for appointment to Port St. Joe. There’s a running joke among my family and co-workers as to whether or not I will return from the week at the beach. Actually, I’m not sure it is ¬all that much of a joke!

I don’t know what it is about the ocean – but it has a kind of “tidal influence” on me. I always want to come back and revisit the scene. The particular beach we visit in the summer is just that – beach. Nothing else. Nestled on the Gulf of Mexico along Florida’s “forgotten coast,” it is like stepping back in time. (I’d tell you where it is, but I don’t want to start a stampede!) Just beach – sand, water, waves, shells, and whatever else comes along with the ocean.

In His conversation with Job, God Himself uses the ocean to point out to Job the distinction in actually being God and in thinking you might be as smart as God. Here is what God says:

“Or who shut in the sea with doors
when it burst out from the womb?—
when I made the clouds its garment,
and thick darkness its swaddling band,
and prescribed bounds for it,
and set bars and doors,
and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stopped’?” (Job 38:8-11,NRSV)

The regular, pounding presence of the waves of the ocean are as fascinating as watching the flames of a fireplace on a cold winter night. I don’t know how much Job understood about the influence of the gravitational pull of the moon on the habits of ocean tides, but you don’t have to know that in order to understand that the ocean is a powerful system. Yet God has set the boundaries – “here shall your proud waves be stopped.”

Walking along the seashore, I eventually will always remind myself, “there is a God!” It isn’t that I spend most days doubting that – but just that the reaffirmation that somewhere there is One capable of saying to the sea, “thus far shall you come, and no farther,” can be a healthy reminder that whatever issues you and I may experience in life, if God can set the boundaries of even the oceans, then He can surely handle the issues of our lives.

When you think about all the “power issues” that infiltrate our lives, often the church and God’s Kingdom, it makes you wish that occasionally God would show up like He did for Job and declare, “here shall your proud waves be stopped.”

Until He does that – which He has promised to do one day in the reappearing of His Son Jesus – perhaps a trip to the beach occasionally would do us all some good!