Tumbled

When visiting family in Florida, I walk the beaches looking for shells. Most of the beaches are all picked clean of shells; however, there is new treasure to find in the sand: sea glass. Broken glass bottles, tossed in the ocean are tumbled over and over by the waves. The salts and tides frost the glass and smooth down all the sharp edges. Perfect sea glass has been tossed end over end by the current so many times that all the shine is worn away and it is smooth as a river rock.

How many days will we spend tumbled in the ocean, dulled by the gnawing salt, thrown onto the sand only to be dragged back to the waves?

If only we could make decisions that matter.

"...Choose for yourselves today whom you will serve... but as for me and my house, we will serve Yahweh." Joshua 24:15

One of the most telling symptoms of adulthood is the number and severity of decisions we have to make everyday. Having managed to somehow survive the day dressed, fed, and relatively uninjured, we reserve very little energy for less immediate, but far more important decisions. Instead, so many human beings collapse into the waves, tossed here and there, preferring an aimless life of drifting and tumbling to the effort and risk required in standing firm or pressing back against the current.

It seems we have forgotten that not choosing is very decisive.

Believers cannot wander into their day obtuse to spiritual battles, too tired to pick a side, too soft to claim holiness. A flippant Christian will be consumed and dulled in the waves. The clarity and brilliance of life in godliness will be frosted over in the elemental crust of ease.

If we are to live a life that matters, a life of purpose and light in a dark age, we have to decide every morning who our God will be. Love and meaning are not passive. They require decisiveness and courage. We either choose to stand against the tide, to crack it in half and howl the wind and waves back to the sea, or we choose to be lost in it.

Where have you neglected to choose whom you serve? On what days do you drift into life with no footing beneath you? Has your world been dulled and frosted, perhaps pretty, but ultimately useless, or do stand radically opposed to the waves, unbending, unbroken, firm on the Cornerstone? Choose for your self this day, but as for me, on Christ, the solid Rock, I stand.