1 No, Still not deep enough
Good week to all, welcome to the ‘front porch’!
As many who 'sit out on the front porch' with us know, for the past year we have been working on a memoir/novel from fifty years ago. Actually, it has been thirty-five years, since in 1989 we first wrote the story in a 350-page book. That big red book has sat on our bookshelves all this time, waiting to be re-visited. Its time came, for which I am thankful, and I suppose the greatest impact the telling and re-telling of that story has had on us is the powerful realization of how big God is – and how powerful, how far-reaching His Providence, how deep is His love. With each stroke of the pen it seems that the tremendous attributes of God – at least those which we feebly can conceive – come flooding to our soul.
It seems appropriate that these 'musings' also remind us of the intent of this “Front-Porch Gospel” these sixteen years. It is a place to look at the gospel from a “front-porch” viewpoint, as it were, not from back in a stuffy office, or down in a squeaky clean lab, or in a classroom of philosophers and theologians perched far too high on a stage.
For several hours before this writing, we have had our own front-porch experience. Going back in time, we have seen the imprint of the Lord’s hand all over those old long-ago events, reminding us again of His glory and power.
Intermingled with these thoughts came thoughts of the nineteenth-century Norwegian oceanographer Fridtjok Nanson, a well-known Nobel-Prize winner and explorer whose fame came from his work in the explorations in the Arctic. It is said that on one expedition he set out to determine the depth of the Arctic Ocean. He planned to drop several pre-measured lines into the water to find the great answer to his quest. He dropped his first line, but it did not reach the bottom. That evening, he wrote in his journal,
“Not deep enough.”
He did the same with the second line, the third line, and on and on – and each time he had the same result and wrote in his journal:
“Not deep enough.”
Finally, he decided the best thing he could do was tie all the lines together and drop them down into the water. The lines dropped several miles into the frigid waters of the Arctic; but, even then, they did not reach the bottom. That evening he again took his journal and wrote the final summation:
“Still not deep enough.”
I think of that story often as I hear of people who try to quantify God, who seek to explain God’s working in extremely narrow 'human' terms. When I hear such explanations that flail wildly, I cannot help but think that they’re trying to measure God’s depth with a finite and limited mind. Even if they could tie all of the great minds of the world together and drop them all down into God’s depth, they would come away with the same conclusion as Mr. Nanson:
“Still not deep enough.”
“My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the Lord. “And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9).
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