Discovering a Big God in a Small Boat

Discovering a Big Godin a Small Boat

John Fehlen#262714Vanguard University of Southern CaliforniaMaster of Arts in Leadership StudiesCLSG606 Spiritual FormationProfessor Roger Heuser April 22, 2008

Fehlen 2I love to kayak. I discovered the sport about seven years ago and have come to enjoy it onan immensely deep and personal level. Kayaking has come to represent something larger andmore profound in my life than I would have ever guessed it could have when I began. It started because I needed a hobby. I was burnt out and tired in ministry. My devotions were sporadic anddull. My marriage was struggling and my heart was shrinking. I desperately needed a restorationof my soul. Little did I realize that, while floating along, I would rediscover a big God in thehull of a small boat.As a point of both meditation and orientation, consider the following words from KimHeacox’s coming-of-middle-age memoir,Blue minarets of ice tipped away at precarious angles. Others stood as fractured fins andflying buttresses two hundred feet tall, certain to fall any day. Any minute. A light rainwashed the ice and rock, the kayak and me. Delicate streams dripped off my hat into ReidInlet where each droplet beaded diamond-like before joining the great whole of the silt-laden sea. Birds called in dialects of kittiwake and tern. A harbor seal watched me withobsidian eyes, only its head above the water, its whiskered face a cipher of mistrust.Icebergs surrounded me, this one a castle, that one a swan, each a corridor into the magicwe know as children but lose as adults. Each capable of rolling over at any time, likeinnocence. My knees were braced against the inside of the kayak. My gear was packed in plastic garbage bags stuffed into compartments forward and aft. Not much room tomaneuver. My feet operated pedals connected to thin cables that controlled the rudder.Push on the left pedal and the kayak went left; push on the right and it went right. Sit stilland it obeyed the higher calling of wind and tides. I glided forward, thinking that akayaker’s passage through Glacier Bay is more like that of light through water, a

Fehlen 3refraction, a silent process of changing –

and being changed

– with each pull of the paddle and chant of the rain, each soft landing of snowflake on ice field. You hear theidioms of ice, the crystals cracking, the glacier groaning. You brace for the icefall thatdoesn’t come because the glacier has more patience than you. You think about geologictime, the depth of a epoch, the tiny tenure of a single human life.”

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Heacox and others have served as an inspiration for me and have fueled my desire to kayak theInside Passage (from Olympia, Washington to Glacier Bay, Alaska). This is a massiveundertaking, one that may take my lifetime to complete, in small portions. For now, many of mykayak trips are near my home, in the waters of the Puget Sound in Northwest Washington State.Picture, if you will, a tiny dime in an olympic-sized swimming pool, and you will have acomparison to that of a kayaker on the Puget Sound. It is humbling and often overwhelming, andyet, one is awed by the magnitude and grandeur of the God of the Universe who dwarfs thewaters of the earth. Big God…small boat. Creator…creation. Him…me.I approach the study of spiritual formation with this glorious backdrop in place. It is veryawe-inspiring to consider that our big God would desire to lovingly form himself within smallme. The mystery is not only found in the ‘Why?’ but also in the ‘How?’.

Why?

Simply put: I am his beloved. God loves

me

. He

wants

to form himself withinme. Henri Nouwen’s thoughts on the matter are compelling:“The spiritual life is a life in which you gradually learn to listen to a voice…that says,‘You are the beloved and on you my favor rests.’ Jesus heard that voice. He heard thatvoice when He came out of the Jordan River. I want you to hear that voice, too. It is avery important voice that says, "You are my beloved son; you are my beloved daughter. I

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Kim Heacox,

The Only Kayak

(Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2005), 3.