Stephanie Rische

Blogger and Writer: Capturing Stories of God's Grace

Looking for God in the Cracks

Navy Pier

My cousin from California recently spent a month with us in the Windy City. It was her first extended stay here, and I hoped she’d fall in love with this place I call home. But Chicago, you sure didn’t make it easy. The evening she arrived, we got almost a foot of snow. The next day we experienced record-breaking low temps, dipping to 25 below zero with wind chill. Although this charming weather pattern may be something of a novelty at first, it doesn’t make any friends when it sticks around for any extended length of time.So as soon as the thermometer registered in the double digits, we decided to take Jen into the city and show her the sights. One of our stops was Navy Pier, a 100-year-old pier that juts 3,000 feet out from the shoreline into Lake Michigan.

When we looked out onto the lake, I was reminded just how vast this body of water is. When you’re standing on the pier, all you can is water on three sides, extending far beyond what the eye can see. I try to imagine how far away Door County is, try to picture the opposite shoreline somewhere in Indiana. But each time, I fail. The magnitude of 1,000 cubic miles of water is beyond what my mind can take in.

Not only that, but it’s also hard to appreciate the beauty of something so vast. It was only when I saw that great lake contrasted against something smaller that I could appreciate its grandeur and beauty. Like when waves crashed against the shoreline. Or when the ice floes bobbed in the current. Or when a gull ducked under the icy surface to procure its lunch. Or when I saw the lighthouse sitting tall and proud on the rocky crag.

I just finished reading Lewis Smedes’s spiritual memoir, My God and I, which he finished writing shortly before his death. This book is a lovely blend of accessible theology and personal stories, at once homespun and profound, and it’s filled with little gems about everything from doubt to hope to old age. But what captivated me from the first page was a letter written to Lewis by his friend Rod Jellema about the presence of God. In part, it goes like this:

Navy Pier

Don’t tell me how God’s mercy
is as wide as the ocean, as deep as the sea.
I already believe it, but that infinite prospect
gets further away the more we mouth it. . . .

The thin and tenuous
thread we hang by, so astonishing,
is the metaphor I need at the shoreline
of all those immeasurable oceans of love.

I can relate to this idea of looking for God in the cracks and crevices of life. My mind tends to go into overload when I try to wrap my brain around the depth and infinite nature of God. But to see God in the tenuous thread I’m hanging on to? Now that I may be able to do.

***

What about you?

Are there times when God seems too vast to take in?

Are there moments when his love is hard to wrap your brain and heart around?

If so, I invite you to join me on the shoreline, clinging to him amid the cracks and crevices.

The Wind in My Sails

“Wanna know what this bucket is for?” the seasoned sailor asked, throwing a pointed glance in my direction.

 

He was taking us out in his sailboat on Lake Michigan, and I was the only one in the group who had never been sailing before. Apparently he was afraid I’d be green in more ways than one.

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I did my best to laugh, desperately hoping I wouldn’t need the bucket.

 

Then it was the sailor’s turn to laugh. “Oh, this bucket isn’t for you—it’s to clean up the deck afterward!”

 

On the way to the boat, we were regaled with sailing stories—about the time his boat flipped over in gale-force winds, the time the fog was so dense he couldn’t find his way back to the dock, the time he was several miles from land in the middle of a lightning storm. I was feeling queasy already, and we hadn’t even set foot onboard.

 

I tried to prep myself for every possible scenario. But when we finally got out onto the water, we encountered the one situation I hadn’t envisioned: everything was utterly still. I held my face up to the sky but couldn’t detect so much as a hint of a breeze.

 

There we were, sitting in the middle of the huge lake—normally filled with cresting whitecaps but on that day looking as smooth as glass. The sails hung limp and lifeless above us.

 

The sailboat boasted every possible gadget you could imagine—a GPS that told you exactly where you were in relation to your destination, a gauge that read the temperate both in the air and in the water, a sensory device that detected the depth of the water and how many fish were camping out beneath the surface. But none of it mattered if we couldn’t leave the shoreline. We had no manmade gadget that could perform the function of the wind. (Although my husband, funny guy that he is, tired his best to fill his lungs and blow on the sails in an attempt to create some action.)

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It turned out to be a lovely, if anticlimactic, afternoon on the water. But as we basked in the sun and ate a picnic lunch on the idle boat, it got me to thinking about the Holy Spirit, of all things.

 

The Bible often uses wind as a metaphor to describe the way God works. Like the wind, a tiny puff of his breath has power to set us in motion, to move us forward, to change our course. We may not be able to see him, but there’s no denying it when we’re in the wake of what he’s doing.

 

Just as you cannot understand the path of the wind . . . so you cannot understand the activity of God, who does all things.

—Ecclesiastes 11:5

 

Our boat outing revealed a nautical and spiritual truth: if God’s Spirit isn’t breathing power into a venture, no amount of huffing and puffing on my part will make it move.

 

The breath of God isn’t something we can control. But we can be ready for it—we can embrace it when it comes. His breath is a gift of movement, a gift of direction, a gift of power. Ultimately, it is the breath of grace.

 

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