Once again, we spent our annual week at the beach in Delaware. Our son, David, left the Pittsburgh area at 8 a.m. for a seven-hour trip. He had his wife and three children aboard. My wife and I left the Harrisburg area at noon for a four-hour trip. We had Rachael, one of our granddaughters, aboard. We had made no arrangements to meet except at the rental office in Bethany Beach at 4:00 p.m. We checked our relative progress once by cell phone, and figured we were about 100 miles apart. Yet, some time later, twenty miles from our destination, Rachael piped up from the back seat, "That looks like Uncle David's van." He was two cars ahead of us. He had even made a wrong turn and had had to double back to get on the right road, all of which put him in the perfect position for the two of us to meet.

What are the odds? There is some divine law of attraction which operates in cases like this, and I think it is an insult to God to write it off as mere coincidence when he goes to so much trouble to arrange it! Don't you wonder what other aspects of our lives those divine laws control, without our being aware of it?

I sat for hours that week in a chair at the water's edge watching Rachael "boogie-board" in the surf. David and I both tried to give her pointers about how to catch the wave just right so that it would give her a ride all the way to the beach. Watching her and the rest of the kids, I realized that there were three possible positions they could take relative to the waves.

The first was missing it altogether. Some of the surfers were too far out, and the wave hadn't even formed where they were standing. For them, the wave might as well not have existed.

The second group saw the wave coming but misjudged it. They were not forward enough to catch the front of the wave, so it merely lifted them off their feet for a moment and broke After it had passed them. But they never got a ride.

The last group understood that you had to be in front of the wave. You couldn't wait until the wave crested to catch it. You had to anticipate it and get ahead of the crest so that it would push you to shore. They were the ones who got the exciting ride, who got up laughing and ran back into the waves for more.

This is an old analogy, but it's a very clear one. Many religious people are stuck in the backwaters where nothing much is happening. Others see the new wave coming, but misjudge it and miss its power. Only those who stay on the edge of the new spiritual wave experience the excitement and the power of the modern revelation.

Have you caught the wave?

Posted 8-01-05

Copyright: John W. Sloat 2005