Into the Deep

Our pastor brought a thimble to church.

I was sitting so far back that I could barely see it. He held it up between his thumb and forefinger and stood in front of the pulpit.

“If what there is to be known about God is an ocean,” he said, “this represents how much we know.”

His illustration stuck with me, and I thought about it again last week as I walked through a sea of people at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. The Mayo campus there has many buildings, a multiplicity of floors, and abundant hallways above and below ground. All of them are filled with people who need healing. 

I was accompanying my dad, who was seeking treatment there, and it gave me ample opportunity for people watching- a boon for any writer. 

There were so many different kinds of people with so many varied needs that I began again to be glad that what there is to be known about God is an ocean. Each need in that place is a question. What is the diagnosis? Are there treatment options? How many days will I have left? What will my days be like with this condition?

No doctor is equal to all of the questions in that sea of people. The doctors there were wonderful and wonderfully qualified, but each only holds a thimbleful of answers for that sea of people. 

I wished for Jesus then. I wished He would step off of the eighth floor elevator and into the hallway, striding down to the waiting area at Desk 8 South. I know the little girl He would have walked up to first.

He would bring the ocean with Him- the ocean of all there is to know about God, “for in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.”

It would be an ocean not only of answers for every question there, but an ocean of knowing for every person in desperate need of being known. That ocean would quell every fear, dispel every sorrow, and lift every soul by its Love. 

While in Rochester, I woke one morning to a full inbox. I laughed when I saw the subject lines. Every cultural commentator from Al Mohler to Suzi Weiss were addressing the same hot topic. I found that being in the sea of people at Rochester had made me not care very much. I thought that cultural commentary was much like the passing waves of a moment. Who cares for a wave crashing into a coast when they are experiencing the depths of the sea?

The Psalmist wrote, “The nations rage, the kingdoms totter…Come behold the works of the Lord.”

There is a place for cultural commentary, certainly, especially from a Christian worldview, but it is good to keep it in perspective. 

If I only have a thimbleful’s amount of knowledge of the God who opens the eyes of the blind and causes the lame to walk, then I want to be careful about any other fluff I am stuffing into my head. Perhaps, instead, as I walk through seas of people, I can choose to follow Jesus’s command to Peter: “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.”

Only in the deep, deep love of Jesus will all the masses find what they are seeking.