But the Sea is Not Full

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The pond shrinks this time of year, when at high noon, the sun brings all the water scraping away from the muddy banks and leaves them to crack under the sun. Papa Jay uses the drought season to find the holes where the pond leaks, and he has done so for many years. A leak in his pond is the rock in his rubber boot. He can’t find it, but it grates on him. Spring rains come, and the pond rises and sends water tumbling down the creek into the woods. But two days later, the creekbed is dry again, and the water has pulled away from the dock legs to leave them stained. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full (Ecc. 1:7).

I caught Papa digging a trench along the banks in the heat of the day, sweat making his hair stick to his forehead. He said he was looking for holes, and that he was going to pour cement into this trench to stop them up. Papa mixes and pours cement nearly every summer, and still, the pond is never full. It’s always draining away into some mink or crawdad’s tunnel. The pond is so low that we hardly fish anymore. Nothing bites, and we wonder if there’s anything left that’s alive.

“I lie in bed just thinking about how I’m gonna do this,” Papa told me, as he bent over his trench. “I had to figure it out— and I decided to dig today so that I can pour the concrete Saturday mornin’, before it gets too hot…” He went on, as if I was taking notes.

I suppose I was, in my head. I was thinking about how futile it all seemed— this concrete-turning, hole-plugging ritual that makes him sweat and lose sleep every summer. Why not just leave it to the rain to fill the pond, at least for a few days? Why break his back over water that’s going to evaporate into the heavens or drain into the earth anyway?

But then again, I have my own holes, don’t I?

I think that’s what the book of Ecclesiastes gets at— that we all want something to fill us, but that all the cement in the world can’t stop up the hole in our hearts. We eat and drink and work till our shoulder blades are sharp bones, but nothing satisfies us the way it should. The sea is never full, and there’s always another hole.

“All things are full of weariness…

the eye is not satisfied with seeing,

nor the ear filled with hearing.”

~ Ecclesiastes 1:8

Work is good, but under a cursed sun, it causes vexation and sickness and anger (Ecc. 5:17). God made us to work, but he made us to work in a place like Eden that would grow and flow at our fingertips. This far east of Eden, my grandpa works along the dry pond banks by the sweat of his brow.

But if Ecclesiastes rings hollow with life as it is now, then the prophecies in Scripture are like the sound of a distant stream, singing, It won’t always be this way. There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, and whose waters flow down into a sea of bottomless joy. It’s a sea with no cracks in it, but that is ever rippling, ever rising, ever full.

And Papa Jay?

“My chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands,” Isaiah says, “They shall not labor in vain…” (Is. 65:22-23).

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“And wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish. For this water goes there, that the waters of the sea may become fresh; so everything will live where the river goes.”

~ Ezekiel 47:9

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