Death of a loved one – or perhaps simply, powerfully death itself – is the greatest affront, insult, injury, offense to human control. It is a dagger to the soul of the illusion of control. It IS a crisis. It creates a crisis…of choice, of surrender, of control, of Who holds the reigns and who will take them. It is a tsunami of reality that crashes and devours and engulfs you in a wild tumble and war of survival . . . or surrender.
I’m thinking of a movie I saw on the airplane recently, The Impossible, a true story about one family’s experience of the tsunami in Southeast Asia in 2004. It somehow captured what it was like to be violently consumed by a tsunami, what happens to the body as it is twisted and battered by the power of the ocean as it gains momentum and speeds toward its new, sovereignly ordained boundary. The struggle for survival is intense and leaves you crippled, confused, weak and vulnerable.
Who really holds the power of life and death? Me? Could I have stopped it? Changed it? Maybe what I did or didn’t do caused it? If only I had . . . oh, the myriad of “what ifs!”
Of course I know that only God holds those keys. Or do I? Do I want to know that? That’s the crisis! It’s frightening. If God holds those keys, HE holds every key and it means I HAVE NO CONTROL. That is the REALITY. But will I choose to live in my illusion riddled with summoned demons, my own feigned fortress of protection and take control in that world of death anyway? Or will I “let go” and give myself to the unpredictable, unrelenting yet irresistible wave and let It carry me where It chooses, into the destiny of It’s Own purpose?
Song of Solomon 8:6-7a Amplified
Set me like a seal upon your heart, like a seal upon your arm;
for love is as strong as death, jealousy is as hard and cruel as Sheol
(the place of the dead). Its flashes are flashes of fire,
a most vehement flame (the very flame of the Lord)!
Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can floods drown it . . .
My Tsunami . . . His love, strong as death and Jealous for His place.
Oh, Father, Your love is a hounding Force beyond my control, pursuing, overwhelming, overpowering . . . frightening. It is a Mystery that I cannot grasp, and hold in my hands. Come, Holy Wave, and consume me into Your Love, so that there is no more me that resists You, only We, me in You and You in me.
Carole Your grieving touches my very inward soul for I have not had the loss of my father,mother, sibling, child or the hardest because he was the very part of the whole you. I only know that as you “let go” He somehow comes into the flooding waters and as you so beautifully have demonstrated fills the “two become one” void. No one can feel that “overwhelming” loss except through that one leaving that “soulmate” behind not by choice as in a divorce, for Jesus explained the only reason Moses had been directed by God to allow because of their… Read more »
Oh Carole, I have never heard such a deeply honest description of the reality of Life and death, of Love and loss, God and ‘me'(a solitary place we meet God in). This is powerfully holy, and yes, puts us where we are, carried by His Holy Wave. Thank you for making ‘the choice’ so very clear. Here we see the extremities and agony of choice in the middle of our ‘no control’, and the hopeful revelation of His Yearning for us as God. Oh what His Desire holds, more in every way than we could ask or think of. Thank… Read more »
Yes Carol! And after we have stepped into the deep, no longer able to touch bottom, we will be flowing in the river of His delights:)
Such a pursuer of souls He is…