“In a life devoted to the one true God, fear is inseparable from joy and joy from fear. Joy in God is disturbingly interlaced with fear of God.
God is the object of your deepest desire and adoration. He is your refuge, your happiest hiding place. And yet God stands over you, above you, often seemingly against you.
As Job confessed, “Though He slay me, I will hope in Him; yet I will argue my ways to His face.” (Job 13:15) Taking refuge in God is intertwined with the knowledge that He who made you and sustains you and loves you can also undo you.
Like the ocean, God’s ways are beyond our understanding and control. Surfers continually puzzle over the intricate intersections of forces and features that produce well-shaped waves, wondering about swell size and period and direction, wind and tide, drifting sand daily recontouring the ocean floor.
But, per Finnegan, “When the surf is big, or in some other way humbling, even these questions tend to fall away. The heightened sense of a vast, unknowable design silences the effort to under-stand. You feel honored simply to be out there.” (335)
When you glimpse a humbling sight of God’s hugeness or holiness, questions fall away. Though you cannot know His design, you do know it is vast.
The more acutely you sense Him, the more complete the silence that blankets your soul. You feel not merely honored but stunned to be loved and looked after by the same love that looks after a star twenty-eight billion light-years away.”
–Bobby Jamieson, Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes’ Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness (New York: WaterBrook, 2025), 195.
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