(Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea)**
I received word that my brother-in-law’s brother, a good man and a kind mind, had passed away. His family was sad and I was sad for them. Yet there was another emotion that rose up in that time of grief over a lost friend.
I am not certain that I can fully characterize the emotion. The closest I can come to labeling my feelings is to admit that they contain an element of envy, a longing to be like the saint who has passed over to new life, borne not of depression but of a desire for relief from the path we walk in this life.
We travel a life-long road that has as its boundaries the sins of pride and desperation—the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.
Saved by grace yet living in this fallen state, we are persistently tempted to a kind of pride that leads the non-believer away from grace and leads the believer to become a casual saint—one who knows about grace but devalues it so that an incautious life and a calloused spirit become tolerable. We become secure in our sin.
The other boundary, desperation, tempts us to look perpetually inward, and backward, and even in a perverse way, forward. We know our past mistakes, we dwell on them, we even dread making them again, knowing that sooner or later we will be weak in whatever realm our souls are habitually weak. We become desperate, but our desperation does not send us to confession and repentance but to the altar of pride where we pronounce ourselves beyond hope.
We travel most peacefully when we look to the end of the road and see Who welcomes our approach. We travel most treacherously when our feet slip into the ditch, pulling us toward temporal destruction, or perhaps as I am now doing, placing a coveted eventuality above His will for me in the present. I make an idol of eternity or a point in time instead of worshipping the God Who gave us time and eternity.
Like Peter, whose brief ecstasy in walking on the waves rapidly changed to panic when he took his eyes off Jesus, we live an entire life buoyed by His gaze or, if not, looking away to sin.
So, there will be relief when the path is at its end, when we are done walking to Jesus, resting in His arms; and moments like these, where one we love has gone ahead, bring a mixture of sadness and wishing to be farther along the path ourselves, beyond the temptations of pride and desperation, beyond the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.
Thank you, Lord, for being there, for not only being at the end of the path, but for giving us Your Comforter to walk beside us and guide us in the daily walk. Amen.
*from Creation and Fall Temptation—Dietrich Bonhoeffer
**from His expedition with the worthy Scots regiment called Mac-keyes—Robert Monro
