Sea Sickness
By Grant Gaines
Have you ever gotten sea sick? It’s not fun at all if you have. You were having such a great time on a boat with your family or friends watching the waves, seeing the beautiful wildlife, or possibly even casting your line for that next big catch when all of the sudden you start to feel a little woozing. First you get a little toasty and begin to sweat as your fun vacation quickly takes a turn for the worst. Not too long after the heat wave hits you, you start getting clammy and losing color in your face.
Your ghostly appearance doesn’t last too long as it is quickly replaced by a greenish tint. After a while your stomach begins to do backflips. There’s no getting around it at this point – you’re as sick as a dog.
But did you know that it’s not all that difficult to avoid getting sea sick in the first place? Of course you could avoid ever going out on the sea in the first place or possibly even pop a few motion sickness pills, but what do you do if you’re already on the open sea and you begin to feel the first signs of this stomach curling feeling coming on? You simply fix your eyes on an immovable object such as the shore or the horizon.
You see, sea sickness flourishes and festers when everything in your line of sight is rocking and rolling like the waves of the sea. But if you can find a fixed object that isn’t moving, you can slay the evil sea sickness dragon.
The same is true for our lives spiritually – the only way we can avoid allowing this volatile world to toss us around like a wave on the raging ocean is to fix our eyes on an immovable object. This of course means that you should put your hope exclusively in your bank account number since we all know that money will never fail us, right? Ok, well maybe our money may seem to be a trampoline that bounces up and down at times, so how about we put our hope in something more stable like our relationships with others. Those are always pretty smooth, aren’t they? Strike two.
We could keep on running down the long list of potential things that we could put our hope in that won’t change, but I think you get the point – there’s really nothing this side of eternity that we can lean on with the certainty that it won’t change. Money, people, and health – as good as all of those are – will one day fail us. So what can we fix our eyes and our hope on that will keep us from being “sea sick” in this fast-paced world? The same thing Job did when his world was falling apart all around him.
You remember Job’s story, don’t you? He was a wealthy man who loved the Lord and was handsomely “rewarded” for his faithfulness by being pushed to the limit by Satan. All of Job’s livestock, crops, and children were swiftly destroyed on the same day (Job 1:13-19). Some reward, huh?
But it was in the midst of all of this chaos that Job famously said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will return. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised” (Job 1:21, NIV).
Job was able to praise the Lord despite his drastic losses because he wasn’t putting any of his hope in these things, but rather he put all of his stock in God. He knew that when you put your hope in anything other than the truth, you will be like an, “…infant, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there…” (Ephesians 4:14, NIV) by every shift in your circumstances. However, when you put your hope in the God “…who does not change like the shifting shadows” (James 1:17, NIV) you are like the wise man that Jesus described in Matthew 7:24-25 (NIV) who, “…built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.”
Like Job we all have this daily choice to make: what do we put our hope in? You may survive for several days, weeks, or even months putting your hope in something like money, relationships, or status, but as you and I know all too well, those will eventually let us down when the storms of life rise up. However, when we put our hope in the unchangeable, Immovable Object that is our Heavenly Father, we can rest assured that whatever storm comes our way, we will not be shaken.
Where are you putting your hope today?
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©Grant Gaines 2016
