The Shoreline of the Invisible

As far as you can hold your confidence.

Do not allow your confusion to squander

The call which is loosening

Your roots in false ground

That you might come free

From all you have outgrown

What is being transfigured here is your mind,

And it is difficult and slow to become new

The more faithfully you can endure here

The more refined your heart will become

For your arrival in your new dawn.

                                                                                  John O’Donoghue

I love to look at the ocean, being near water brings joy to my soul. I love that game of standing on the edge of the shore line. Inching yourself closer and closer to get a little bit wet and then running away. That waiting and running, falling and giggling. Pretending you can predict the rhythm and power of the vast water. It is the bread and butter of holidays. If you haven’t played that game and got soaking wet you are doing something wrong.

A few months ago, I sat on a beach, in England and looked at the immensity of the north sea. It wasn’t a particularly bright or sunny day. I had a coat on. I sat and drank an amazing cup of coffee, and ate a delectable brownie. I felt, in a good way, very small, as I looked at the ocean. It contains so much power and rhythm. I looked at the beach and journalled for several hours. The space, distance and disturbance between here, the very real right now of our human experience and the Kingdom of heaven, where the real and the right now, are perfected seemed to grow smaller and smaller. There was something transcendent in the rhythm of the ocean. Knowing the unknown moment exists, when the energy of the tide will shift, and waiting in anticipation for that moment. There is an exquisite anguish in that transitory expectation. It refines away the roots that no longer nourish, and the patterns that now cause harm, and the armour somebody else tried to put on you. It is the moment, where if we can endure faithfully, rather than rushing to fix things, our hearts will be refined in a way that constant activity cannot accomplish.

I have been through some transitions in  my life. Big ones, and small ones and they are never easy. It isn’t easy. The waiting is terrible. The unknown, is challenging, nobody likes a cliffhanger and yet that is what keeps us watching and waiting. I tuned into Lost faithfully every week for seven years, mainly because the cliffhangers, thank you J J Abraham, were enthralling. I have begun to realise that when the bible says our hearts are restless till we find our rest in Him. It’s because He is the only constant. We crawl, walk or run through life along a shoreline of experiences. An invisible sea washes over us. In this constant interim, we call life, with an eye on heaven and our feet in the very real, actual world we find our rest in the one who calls us to walk, as closely as we can to the shoreline of invisibility.

An ache of discomfort grows in the interim, some of the roots we are familiar with no longer nourish. The next moment is what we are waiting for. The next moment comes and then transition follows again.

So the interim, is a place where God dwells, a place where God calls us to dwell also.

We live in a constant interim, a constant understanding of waiting on God, understanding that what our hearts yearn for, more than anything else, is a place we can only glimpse in this life. I have become increasingly comfortable with the mystery of God’s will and at the same time more assured than ever of the goodness of his heart. This tension is the interim where joy and contentment dwell. This causes me to be at peace when relationships hurt, when work has failed and everything seems to be falling apart. One of my favourite poets penned these immortal words and they ring true in this interim

No Coward soul is mine,

No trembler in this world’s storm troubled sphere.

I see heaven’s glories shine

And faith shines equal arming me from fear.

There it is, right there! The truth that our world is storm troubled, but the greater reality that the heaven’s shine brighter. Emily Bronte walked along that invisible shoreline and left a trail for me to follow!

The constant interim is the call of the Christian. Abraham lived his entire life in Faith, longing for a building whose architect was God. He completed decades of faithful service in hope for something he would never see. As Christians, we live on the shoreline of the invisible. Knowing that what we see is barely a pin prick in the tapestry of eternity. We are desperate to make our pin prick count. That the shoreline of the invisible might be visible to one who walks behind us.