"When you’re driven hard by the waves of life, it’s tempting to be driven by either pride or fear."

Ann Voskamp writes at A Holy Experience,

hen I feel like we’re drowning in it all a bit, our daughter, Hope and I, we go up to the lake and feel the waves pound, feel the serene fury of water.

Feel the waves breaking against the earth and it quakes the inner cochlear and there’s nothing else to hear but the breaking.

Hope stands there with wind blowing strands of hair across her face, the electrical energy of each breath of wet, briny air sparking something in her.

“Is there anything lovelier, really, than the way waves keep touching the shore no matter what tries to keep pulling it away?” I lean into her, point down the foaming shoreline. Say it over the sound of the wind, of the crashing surf.

Hope tucks her hair behind her ear, “Love’s like waves — keeps reaching out no matter what tries to keep pulling it away.”

Her and I stand there in the battering of the elements, watching waves, watching how the light catches in water, how the waves move like the earth’s own pulse — like our own heartbeat.

“You know — a pool isn’t like this.” I say it slow, watching the waves, seeing it for the first time: “It has no power, no life — because it has no breaking of waves… Strange how that is: It’s in the breaking, there is life.”

What did my husband say again and again? “Never be afraid of being a broken thing… Unless a seed breaks, there is no life.”

...Scar tissue is stronger than original skin ever is. Scars are where the strength gets in — our breaking is where our strength gets in.

Love is what we have to give —- and love comes from places that are vulnerable and soft and tender enough to feel — to break.

Only those who are really vulnerable enough to be broken — get to be the ones who really love.

It can be that when you feel broken — it’s proof that you’ve given.

...Far beneath the breaking waves, beneath the crashing storm of things, there is a space, a stillness of the sea that doesn’t ever stir. That’s never disturbed.

...The only way through a wave breaking over you is to break deep into the roiling water and and dive down into the depths and stretch out both arms through the fathoms and and let yourself be made into the shape of a Cross.

Break into a shape of a cross, arms out-stretched and surrendered, and break deep into the breaking waves — and you break into the deep, deep peace of God. In the midst of the storms — live shaped like a cross, arms broken wide open, and you can break into the still cushion of the sea.

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