To Skim or not to Skim

When I was a kid growing up in South Florida, the beach was a part of my life. To this day I feel at home on a beach.
One of my favorite activities was skim boarding.

Before the days of mass marketing of beach toys we made our own beach toys. A skim board was made from plywood and a lot of sweat. My friends and I all had skim boards.

The skim board was used where the waves hit the beach and made a very shallow shelf of water that you had to catch to skim on before the water ran back into the deeper water. When you caught the thinning wave just right you could get a really fun ride. The end of the ride was almost always a crash as the board dug into the sand and the rider would go flying and then hit hard on the sand.

Every day of skim boarding was fun, tiring and hard on the skin. We were young. Recovery was fast. The waves were endless and free.

I loved to skim board back in those days. Today my energy and recovery time is not quick enough to skim.

Os Guinness devotes nearly an entire chapter in his book Long Journey Home to what he quotes Pascal as calling "diversion".
Diversion is a lot like skim boarding. According to Pascal and Guinness humans skim because they are avoiding the deeper waters of life. Pascal said "If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from it. Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things. I have often said that the sole cause of a man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his own room" Ouch!

Diversion is not a spiritual discipline. It is a spiritual illness or addiction. Os Guinness goes on to say, "...our modern world has expanded the array of diversions beyond anything Pascal observed. Modern society itself is one grand diversion--the Republic of Entertainment." Ouch again!

Can we stand even for a few hours to dive into the depths of the human issues Pascal mentions? Issues like death, wretchedness and ignorance? Can we dare wade into such issues without drowning our own hope in the process?
Can we swim or will we be swept away by issues for which our answers provide no strength to swim?

My wife, Pam, can go in her room alone and be happy. She has never needed to skim anything. I have envied her this great ability to surf the waves of deeper thought while I have spent many days skim boarding the issues. Little by little I have learned that there is more to life than the thin waves of dailyness that come and are quickly gone. There is an ocean and in it there are living things that take one's breath away with their beauty and power.

Put your skim board away. Go into your room and be alone with the great questions and with your great God. Scary isn't it!
So is scuba diving, surfing and sailing. You were made for the waves and winds of the bigger issues. Seek them and know that God is the God of the oceans we fear.