In this movie I had recently seen; there was a large shark that had been jawing on the carcass of a bloated whale in the waters just off the Pacific coast of Mexico. The whale was floating outside the surf zone. Apparently, a vast quantity of dead meat was not enough for this swimming garbage disposal. Then enter one surfer from the U.S., riding the waves alone in the shallows above a reef. The shark decided to chomp on something else in the water, the surfer. Within moments, it knocked the surfer off her board as she was riding this wave; then, without ripping, it bit into her left leg while she was off her surfboard, thrashing in the waves.
She managed to get to this small rock barely protruding during low tide before a possible second attack could take place. In severe pain, she innovatively cut off the right sleeve of her wetsuit top with sharp coral rock and used the neoprene as compression on her wounded leg, and she secured it with her surfboard leash; fortunately for her, she was a medical student taking a break away from her studies after the death of her mother. She was on a soul-searching journey which is why she was somewhere down the Pacific coastline of Mexico. Her dad wanted her to finish school rather than go on a surfing safari.
Ironically, there was a seagull on this small outcropping that had a dislocated wing, and some blood sprinkled on its body. The only thing I could figure out was that this gull must have been snacking on part of the whale when that shark chomped down in the same vicinity as the misfortunate gull.
Here we had a scene of two injured “gulls” on a coral reef off the coast of a remote beach where very few of the locals go unless they happened to be surfers. The entire movie was about surviving in isolation and getting off that rock to safety from a ferocious sampler of anything floating. The surfing was great; the shark was, too, a large great white. She was feeling alone because she was alone. In all of her struggles, I noticed that she never called out to God for help (fancy that).
She was caught up in a fog of her own making (2 Cor 4:4). Unable to get past her mother's death was what brought her south of the border. She probably figured that God didn't save her mother and that He is not going to deliver her from this life-threatening ordeal. Like humanistic thinking, if she was going to make it out alive, it would be up to her, not God. Her mother was a fighter and lost; maybe, her mother believed in God? She resolved to be a fighter and win!
She was caught up in a fog of her own making (2 Cor 4:4). Unable to get past her mother's death was what brought her south of the border. She probably figured that God didn't save her mother and that He is not going to deliver her from this life-threatening ordeal. Like humanistic thinking, if she was going to make it out alive, it would be up to her, not God. Her mother was a fighter and lost; maybe, her mother believed in God? She resolved to be a fighter and win!
After her harrowing ordeal, the scene shifts to the future on that same sandy beach. The female surfer had returned to medical school and became a doctor. She and her daughter are about to enter the very waters where she did battle with a great white shark. The daughter asked her mother if she would ever be as good of a surfer as she was. The mother quickly responded, “No!” They both entered into the surf to have a whale of a time as the dad/grandfather watched from the beach. The movie ends, leading me to believe the fog remained.
Earlier that day, I had sent an email of encouragement to a saint feeling stressed and vulnerable. Ever have those moments where the circumstances of life seem to make our minds foggy and prevent us from viewing a situation in light of the spiritual reality of God’s presence and sovereignty? If you are like me, sure you have. Unfortunately, we all have shared in those “God is not on the throne” moments.
In the mayhem, as believers, we can lose our spiritual equilibrium from taking our eyes of faith off of God and onto our situations, becoming discombobulated and disoriented. To what degree we spiritually debilitate depends on how long we linger in the fog. It is faulty thinking that clouds our judgment and generates limited spiritual visibility for ourselves whenever we decide to evaluate the situation of life from a horizontal perspective rather than vertically (Col 3:1-2). God is not in the viewfinder of our thinking.
We ignore the fact that Yahweh’s attribute of omnipotence (all-powerful, Rev 1:8) signifies that He has the ability to allow nothing to enter our lives apart from His will. His omniscience (all-knowing) tells us God is fully aware of our situation. His omnisapience (all-wise) means that He knows what He is doing. His omnipresence (all-present) conveys that He is right there with us every moment of the day or night and promises to never leave us or forsake us. Whatever befalls us, Romans 8:28 is still in the Book.
Now, that all sounds pretty good until something bad happens to us or to someone we love or care about. In the crucible is where we see the dramatic distinction between knowing about or of God and knowing Him personally. If we do not trust and think and act upon what we know about God or of God when the proverbial stuff hits the fan, our knowledge of God is revealed to be merely academic or intellectual. It is in the application of what we know of or about God (we call it the experiential knowledge of God) that lifts the fog by the light of His Word.
Now, we may not like what we see when the fog has dissipated, but His grace is always sufficient to meet our needs and to see us through it. It is in the fog where God’s love or power or intentions are all called into question – Why? How could a loving God allow bad things to happen? Where are You? Where is the love of God in all of this? And etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Remember Job’s words to his wife after their horrendous ordeal,
(Job 2:10) But he [Job] said to her, “…. Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity? ….”
In the context of Job’s sufferings, that is nothing short of supernatural restraint and reasoning under severe pressure. This is definitely not the thinking nor the language of the world under such extreme circumstances! There are no expletives or denigration of the Majesty of the Almighty.
How different is this response to adversity nowadays! We stub our toe and cry out to God, “Why?!!” We want the benefits of Psalm 1:3 without doing Psalm 1:1-2! The fog is so thick; you could cut it with a knife. Paul never said all things were good, but all things work together for good (Rom 8:28). There is a Divine purpose for the good that comes our way as well as the bad. Our situation may be classified as rare or random by others, but this is simply not the case with any believer. Again, nothing enters our life without His permission.
Job was in a world of hurt. Usually, when we are torn out of the frame, we have a tendency to give people a pass under pressure, but Job is not insensitive to his wife’s foolish petition (Job 2:9, 10). The devil was taking advantage of Job's wife, while she was emotionally distraught, in an insidious attempt to get her husband to curse God (Job 1:11; 2:5) and prove God wrong about Job. Who would have the most influence over Job than the love of his life other than God, his wife; the kids were already dead!
Mrs. Job got all fogged up from the worst possible catastrophic event imaginable and went horizontal, but Mr. Job did not and stayed vertical in his thinking (Job 2:3, 10c; cf. Job 13:15) because of his spiritual integrity (Job 1:1). He maintained the course despite the horrendous circumstances surrounding his life. On a side note, with our legal mentality today, God would be viewed as complicit for authorizing Satan to do this or that in the world.
The world will charge God of complicity because He allows sin in the world (contrast Jas 1:13). His omnipotence will be challenged because it appears He is unable to prevent or stop bad things from happening. It might be that the world thinks that God is just plain indifferent to the plight of man! The world is going to trash the character and conduct of God through the fogginess of their sinful thinking; it is called spiritual blindness (2 Cor 4:4).
As believers, any cloudy confusion is temporary (hopefully), generated by the intentional ignorance of Scripture and willful disobedience, or both. We begin to think and act foolishly in such a way that runs contrary to the belief in the supremacy and sufficiency of Christ in all things. We got the horizontal thinking, speaking, and acting going on; it leads to fog.
When I finally made it to bed that night after the movie, you know how oftentimes our dreams are comprised of the fragmentation of things we experienced that day? Well, I had this dream of being in an isolated place. It is not the first time I had this dream theme of being in a remote and unidentifiable location.
My spiritual failures in life were brought to my attention in an accusative, insensitive, and demeaning manner as I stood alone in the midst of nowhere. Imagine looking at a bluish-gray wall. From a 360-view, all I could see was that color without borders or windows. It was as if I was in a blue-gray fog for that is all that I could see; honestly, I don’t have a clue where the blue-gray color came from or represented! Feeling helpless and worthless, it was as if someone was attempting to convince me that my life amounted to nothing.
Can the devil climb into our dreams? I don’t know; maybe he was my metaphorical great white shark swimming in the blue-gray, attempting to get me off this rock that I was standing on? Anyway, what was going on with me sounds like Satan’s MO. If he is able to get into our dreams, then so can God (1 Jn 4:4). There are some dreams going on in Scripture.
Suddenly, I was awakened by a coldness over my body. Sometime in the night, Beverly had borrowed more than her fair share of the comforter blanket! My core body temp lowered to the point I was awakened from shivering at 0400 hours.
Quickly, I reached for my robe. I thought to myself, “My, what a rough dream!” There was a faint residual trace of the feeling of worthlessness from my dream; I was fully awake. So, I went up to my study and read for a while and then went back to bed at 0500. I had thirty more minutes of sleep before the alarm sounded.
Whether counseling, watching a movie, or having a weird dream, there was a thread of isolation and feelings of fear that had crept into my dream in the early morning hours of the next day. My fear was that these terrible accusations leveled against me were true. Satan likes to get you alone and then hammer down on you, like that great white shark, if he is allowed to do so. Sometimes our fears are only that, imaginary. Better it is to fear God than find ourselves terrorized in a fog of our own making. Faith in Him, grounded in His Word, is a fog-breaker! <><
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