I have wanted to surf since I first watched Johnny Tsunami as a kid. The film released 24 July 1999, less than a week after my 9^th birthday, and just after a rather traumatic move from Colorado Springs to Hurley, SD – a tiny farming town nestled in what my nine-year old mind thought was an endless wasteland of corn and soybean fields. I don’t know that I watched it immediately, but I remember being quite frequent to the Disney Channel as a kid, especially after our move to what would be a very difficult place for me.

               If you aren’t familiar with the film, do yourself a favor and watch it. It isn’t a masterpiece or anything, but there are some wonderful scenes, and the snowboarding and surfing are solid all the way around. As an aside, the movie also made me want to try Snowboarding, which I did a few short years after, but that is a story for another time. Suffice it to say that snowboarding never held the allure for me that surfing did.

               Still, it would be twenty-three years before I took the chance to actually go out and start surfing after moving to Hawaii in 2022. One of my co-workers took up surfing about the same time and invited me to Waikiki to go try it out. Knowing what I know now, Waikiki wasn’t a great place to try to learn in September, but we did it anyway, and that’s where this surfing journey really starts.

               Step 1: Get in the water

               Step 2: get on the board

               Step 3: fall off board because your balance is wrong

               Step 4: Get back on the board

               Step 5: Slide off the board in the other direction, back into the water

               It took what felt like ages (though it was really only half an hour or so) to figure out how to balance myself on the board while I then proceeded to paddle horribly out to a small break. My friend, had been out before, so he had a better handle on the balancing of the board, but blessedly he didn’t roast me too much. It was this first time out that I decided that in order to learn this thing called surfing, I had to jettison any notion of shame.

               I cannot count how many times I fell off my board just trying to sit up in the water and wait for waves, or how many times a wave crashed over me (tiny waves still) and sent me in some unknown direction. My heart was pumping, my mind was reeling. It was a profoundly humbling experience. I knew nothing, and while there was some progress in learning how to balance, it was not much progress. It would take me four more sessions before I actually stood up on a wave, though a later post will talk about one wave I missed in Waikiki this very first day, that haunted me at the time, though I hardly think of it at all now.

               Despite the frustration and falling and everything, the water was warm, the sun was brilliant, the views were good, and I laughed a lot. I am thankful to God that He didn’t get me out there earlier in my life, at a time when my patience was far less and my level of serious self-reflection was too high. If I had done it even a few years earlier, Lord knows I probably would have simply quit and never looked back. As it stood though, I was hooked. It was challenging, and fun, and I felt that little kid in me, nine-years-old and crazy lonely in a new place yearning for waves rise up in me yelling joyfully, “thank you.”

               There’s more to my obsession with surfing than just the tie to a childhood longing, but there’s also somehow nothing more important. I won’t wax too eloquent here, but the Lord says, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven (Matt 19:14).” There is much to unpack in that statement from our Lord, but at the minimum we ought to think about ways to be more childlike, and surfing has become an expression of that for me when at my best.

               PRINCIPLE: Now, there is a principle to this as well. Throw out the rule of cool. When you first become a Christian there is a strong learning curve. For those blessed with being raised in Godly homes, you may not have noticed it, similarly to those surfers who grew up on the North Shore. For those who come to Christ later in life, though, there is a profoundly unsettling imbalance when Christ rips us from the Kingdom of Darkness and revives us into His glorious Kingdom of Light. It’s going to feel strange. You have become a new creation, a baby in the faith, and you must relearn how to walk, to think, to breathe, to be. Everything about it is odd.

               The spiritual truth I want you to take away from the story of my first time surfing though, is to not let that feeling of strangeness or imbalance stop you. Don’t go back to land. Don’t give up on the Lord as if He somehow failed you in your conversion. Don’t shrink back, but rather lean in. Every time I fell off the board the ocean caught me, and despite being massively powerful, the ocean can also be quite forgiving of a fall. God’s grace is similar. It is powerful and potent and frightening in many ways, but it’s also there to catch you as you wobble your way on this journey of sanctification. A strong difference between surfing and sanctification that will leave this chapter on a hopeful note, is that in surfing you really must rely on yourself to get through it, figure it out, learn, and grow. There are no promises you will get better.

               In Christ and His sanctification, the path is more sure. Philippians 1:6 says, “And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” In this journey of sanctification, we have this strong and sure promise (and not just this but many) that He who began this work in you will bring it to completion. If you belong to the Lord truly, then you have a magnificent promise that He will bring you through this all. For new believers especially (but perhaps for tired older believers as well), take the Lord’s promise to complete His work in you as both assurance and motivation to continue down the path the Lord is laying.