Toward the Deep

The fishermen know the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangerous sufficient reason to remain ashore.
-Vincent van Gogh

It is a part of my make-up that I am compelled toward the deeper places, to delve into the inner-world of things.  I was that way even as a kid.  While my brother was riding his skateboard and learning how to do grinds and kickflips, I was trying to figure out how the trusses worked.  I’d get spares and old broken ones and look them over.  I loved to take old telephones and radios completely apart and lay out all the pieces in front of me and marvel that in that condition, they were not much to look at — interesting but worthless pieces of plastic and metal, springs and screws and magnetic parts — but together they did some amazing things.  I say “old” electronic equipment, but it wouldn’t always be.  I would, in fact, take everything apart I could get my hands on, often at quite an expense for my parents when I couldn’t get them back together again.  My dad would work on engines in the garage, and I would love to imagine how the numerous pieces of metal parts scattered on the rags and towels in the floor would somehow fit together to make something happen.

One of my favorite play-things growing up (aside from my Micromachines collection) was a chemistry set I got when I was 10.  It was fascinating to me how by itself, the dry and dusty chemicals could be innocuous and boring, but put together with another element or compound, amazing things would happen.  Sometimes things so violent they were even explosive.  I loved that!… which is why when I graduated high school I left home to attend a university to study chemistry.

But through the course of my college years I would come to discover that my love wasn’t for chemistry, per se.  Nor was it for electronics or really anything material.  Oh, it was fascinating to me — and it still is — but not for its material properties or strange behaviors.  It was interesting because it represented some kind of operating principle inside me, a kind of passion or fascination for the reality of deep things, or things that operated behind the curtain, out of sight, back-stage, below the surface.  (The other thing I loved to do growing up was writing.  When I learned to write my name, I wrote it on everything — the walls, books, the floor.  I remember my mom once pointing to one of the signatures I wrote on the wall asking me if I did it.  I said no.  She didn’t buy it.  I guess I was more creative than I was shrewd.)

It was around this time that I began a long trek back home to the heart of God, a prodigal who had decided some time before that life would be better out there on my own.  It was not.  Anyway, the invitation I heard that started me on my journey of coming back home to Him was an invitation into the depths.  Funny enough, one of the books that had a huge impact on my life at the time was Calvin Miller’s Into the Depths of God.  For the first time ever in my life, I was invited to explore the deep — the endlessly deep and extravagantly beautiful and intricate — heart of God.

To this day, He remains way cooler than the guts of a telephone or radio.

But there is a price to entering into the depths of God.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote of the cost of discipleship in a book by that title.  “Costly grace,” he wrote, “is the gospel which must be sought again and again… It is costly because it costs a man his life.”  But he also knew the cost was worth it, for “it gives a man the only true life.”  Dallas Willard said someone should write a book called The Cost of Non-Discipleship, because he feels the cost is far greater.

Jesus’ invitation is often a painful one.  He will ask us to give up all that keeps us afloat and on the surface and risk plunging into the heart of the questions we dare not ask aloud, to enter into the deep wounds of our lives so as to know His healing, to explore the stretches of the gospel on earth, to know the rich expanses of His love and how far it will really reach.  This is indeed a frightful invitation.  It is a dangerous one.  You never know what you’ll end up discovering or leaving behind, or what He will ask of you, or what the journey will require.

I’ve discovered life there, though.  It really is to be found.  Like anyone who has really tasted God, who has really tried Him out and tried Him on (this He dares us to do — see Psalm 34:8), I’m wasted for anything less.  I’m not “there” yet, but I’ve found the journey one worth taking.  The sea is dangerous, but we are made for it.  As St. Augustine understood it, we will be restless until we finally allow our hearts to find rest in the Resistless One.