I remember the way I described the Atlantic Ocean in my letters to Papa Larry from Cape Cod, when we walked the easternmost hem of Race Point Beach with the sea “rising and falling at our sides.” But the Pacific, I now realize, does not “rise and fall” like some prim lady curtsying. It cracks against the rocks like a wet whip. Watching from California’s coast a few weeks ago, I thought about a John Wayne movie I’d seen with Maureen O’Hara in it. If the Atlantic is the lady, the Pacific, I thought, is the cowboy.
We were walking a path high above Natural Bridges Beach that day. At the cottage that morning, Jared and I had read Proverbs 6 over the phone, about how we can learn our lesson by considering the gazelle, the bird, and the ant. Jared’s been watching hummingbirds migrate and flock to his back porch this summer. I had been looking at the different kinds of trees and birds on the coast. The writers of Scripture, I thought, not only listened closely to God, but they must have also held their eyes open to nature—to deer and wind and sparrows and lilies of the field; mustard seeds and fig trees and shafts of wheat at harvest.
“Look at the birds of the air,” Jesus said. “Consider the lilies of the field,” and these were commands. Another word is to “behold,” and in Scripture, the object of that attention is always God himself. Yet the way we behold him is through his works, his mighty acts, his created heavens, his roaring seas.
Sitting on a rock in the spray of the Pacific, I could imagine the Psalmist standing at the end of himself, writing:
“All your breakers and your waves have gone over me” (Ps. 42:7).
Or David comforting himself with the imagery:
“If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me.”
~ Psalm 139:9
God reveals himself to man by his creation, and he does not reveal himself half-heartedly—just as the Pacific does not throw itself upon the coast with half its strength. Scripture commands us to take all this crashing revelation and to “Behold your God.” I have beheld him as I’ve sat upon the lip of general revelation, and you, dear reader, among the hummingbirds in September, have too.
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