Caught In The Currents
It was Holden Beach, North Carolina. We had a single-wide trailer on a small pond where you could almost see the intracoastal waterway from the porch. When I was a kid, we went there constantly. Every summer. Sometimes two or three times a year. That beach was my refuge. The pier where we fished was one of my truest friends. And the aroma of sea salt mixed with day old fish that lingers over oceanic waters smelled like home to me. I knew the sands, the heat, and how to ride the perfect wave on a foam boogie board.
I was probably eight years old when my mother gave me one simple rule when it came to my aquatic adventures. She said, "Stay lined up with my chair." That was it. She did not give me some overly protective rules for bubble boy. She simply told me that no matter how many epic waves I caught, my body needed to be aligned with hers so that when she looked up she could instantly catch sight of me, doing something epic, of course.
So I said okay without an ounce of reflection and ran exuberantly into the water.
The problem is that an eight year old boy often has the foresight of a hungry mosquito that lights on a juicy arm. Not knowing how dramatically ocean currents behaved and how intently I would need to manage the situation gave way to reality giving me the tender smack.
That is the thing about the current. You cannot feel it happening. Not really. You are swimming out through the breakers, paddling to catch the next wave, riding the crest, slamming into the sand like a boss. While you're at it, you feel like you are moving perfectly perpendicular to the shoreline. Straight out. Straight in. Repeat. But underneath the surface of the water, something patient, subtle, and stronger than you begins carrying you imperceptibly where you had not decided to go.
Technically, I did not disobey my mother. Not exactly. I did not actively swim horizontally along the beach until I was out of alignment with her Walmart beach chair. And, for that matter, I did not look back at her plastic chair with the cavalier attitude that screams, "to hell with the rules." What I did was I just stopped looking. I became fixated on what I was doing and forgot to pay attention to where I was going.
And in the end, that was just enough.
I caught wave after wave. I got tossed around like a rag doll under the force of creation's power. I played until I forgot there was such a thing as chairs or rules. Nothing in the world existed for me outside of the next wall of water. And true to nature, the current did the rest. It didn't ask my permission. It didn't need me to agree with it. It only needed me to stop paying attention.
When I finally remembered to look up, I wasn't greeted with the sight of my smiling mother in her dated tie dyed chair. I saw a shirtless cowboy whose rotund figure was already turning lobster red from over indulging the sun. After scanning the horizon to find her, I noticed that she was nothing more than a speck a football field away, waving at me the same hands that would likely soon be spanking me. And even though I could not hear the words she was yelling at me over the surf, I knew exactly what all of it meant.
I had drifted off course.
Proverbs 21:16 says, "A man who wanders from the way of understanding will rest in the assembly of the dead."
Wandered. Drifted. Pulled. Without notice.
That is a word that ought to scare us, because we do not even notice it as it is happening.
Solomon does not say that this man ripped up his Bible, cursed God, abandoned his family, and ran screaming into a brothel. He wandered. He floated along ignorantly like an ox to the slaughter. All he had to do was stop paying attention.
We like to imagine ruined men as firebrands who deliberately drive their lives into a brick wall at a hundred miles an hour. Sometimes that happens. Usually it does not.
Usually a man ruins himself one highway mile at a time. He gets a little lazy. He nurses a scintilla of bitterness. He harbors that minuscule craving in the shadows. He becomes just a soupçon softer on his sin or just a wee harder toward correction. He does not stop believing the truth in an instant. He just stops looking at it as a reference point long enough for the current to pull him miles off target.
That is the man Solomon is talking about. He is not trying to leave the path. He still thinks he is on it. Ask him how he is doing and he will give you the American, "I'm good, how are you?" Ask him about his marriage and he will give you some curated political ramblings that in effect use the most words possible to say absolutely nothing. Ask about his prayer life and he will tell you he has been just a hair busy. Ask why he stopped attending corporate worship and he will deflect onto a thousand excuses he has legitimized in his head. The problem is that he has an explanation for everything and repentance for nothing.
He is eighty yards down the beach, still looking at the waves, instead of noticing the unfamiliar soil in front of him.
In this way, nobody decides to stop praying for a decade. You skip a few nights because you are tired. A few more because you are busy. And before long you are comfortably prayerless.
Nobody decides to raise children who do not know God. You begrudgingly sign them up for the football league on Sunday. You have too much going on at work to lead family worship. You are tired, so you let the television spend more time with your children than you do. You get them the cell phone so you can always get a hold of them, but leave it with unfettered access. Before long, your child loves the world you gave them instead of the God you didn't. You taught them that God matters in some amorphous, ethereal sense, but not enough to bow down to and confess undying loyalty to.
That is precisely how a household drifts into hell. Not usually through one explosive act of rebellion, but through a father who threw out the anchor and stopped checking the chair.
A man does not normally wake up and decide to become a serial adulterer. He nurses bitterness. He adopts a pinch of victimhood. He notices that so and so gives him attention. Before long he is going out of his way to talk to her. He finds more than a handful of common interests that fuel laughter and conversation. He begins believing she really gets him, whereas the nagging wife exists only to crush any remaining manhood out of him. And it is precisely at this point, eighty yards down the beach, that a little flirting goes too far and that man ends up with a hotel room and a new stain on the bed announcing his guilt. By the time the affair happened, the current had been dragging him for months.
That is why wandering is so dangerous. Outright rebellion is loud enough to avoid. But a slow and steady drift will sing you off to sleep.
Sitting in that fold out beach chair on the shores of Holden Beach, my mother could see something I did not have the eyes for. She could see the whole stretch of beach and the currents that would drag me away. I could only see the waves. That was the difference.
And in a way, that is what the Word of God is for us. It is the beach chair you are meant to keep looking at, orienting yourself to, making adjustments early when the drift is still correctable. God's Word is God telling you where the shoreline is so you do not become too busy swallowing saltwater to notice you have moved.
That is what a faithful church is for. That is what elders are for. That is what honest brothers are for. That is what a godly wife is for when she looks at you and says, "You are not the man you used to be."
Do not get angry with the chair because it exposed the current and your thoughtlessness. Do not attack the person who loves you enough to point out how far you ended up down the beach. It is far better to feel the shame of being found off course than to keep drifting until nobody can see you anymore.
When I looked up, my mother had not left. She was still there, yelling out at me, because I belonged to her. The warning was the mercy.
Well, in the same way, Christ has done exceedingly more than stand on the beach barking directions at drowning men. He came into the water. He let the currents take Him instead. He entered the black undertow of judgment, stepping underneath the tsunami of God's fury to rescue us from the folly of our drift.
Without intervention, we would have all followed the current down into the way of death, as Solomon told us. But out of the depths of His lovingkindness, Jesus went into our sinkhole of death, took it by its foamy throat, and then came back from its chaotic depths below, alive forevermore, to share that life with people prone to wander, prone to drifting, prone to getting dragged away without so much as noticing.
Christ does not rescue sinners so long as they become strong swimmers or learn how to course correct themselves. We are blind in a sea of currents with no way to keep our hold. In that, Jesus rescues sinners out of sheer grace and mercy, so that none of us could boast.
On this day, you may have lost sight of the chair, but if you belong to Christ, He will never lose sight of you. You may realize right now that the currents have carried you farther than you ever meant to go, but it cannot carry you beyond the reach of His hand. So look up. Look to the one whose cross will anchor you in the drift. Repent of where you are, and swim back to where you should be. Trust that Christ has saved you, and your repentance is the joyful response to it. Stop making excuses for yourself. Stop drifting down the beach. And surrender your direction to Him.
