Arch your back in a banana shape, paddle smoothly, straight forward. Hold your hands just so. Don’t rock side to side. Use your body weight. Position correctly on the board, not too far forward or back. Paddle, paddle, paddle. See the wave, turn, paddle, paddle, paddle. Catch the wave, paddle, paddle, stand. Ride for some seconds, maybe up to a minute on an epic wave, and then paddle back out.

               On a great day I might catch fifteen waves in an hour, with an average ride of maybe fifteen to twenty seconds. That’s three to five minutes of actually riding to fifty-five or fifty-seven minutes of waiting, watching, and paddling. How often do you see an epic reel of someone waiting for a wave, watching waves, or paddling around between waves? Sure, perhaps you have seen some lesson videos on how to paddle or read waves, but the vast majority of surfing content is about the surfing itself. There’s nothing glamorous or impressive about paddling, waiting, or watching, but without it you will never catch any waves. Without this unglamorous, rote activity, the epic airs, beautiful maneuvers, and cool nose rides can never occur. Put bluntly, most of surfing is waiting, watching, and paddling.

               After an hour, when I first started, the paddling had exhausted me well past the point of being able to lift myself up on the board to even catch a wave. As I have grown in my paddle strength, as well as wave reading skill, I can go out for two to three hours at a time. My wave count is way up because of this, but I never would have gotten there without some practice with paddling, waiting, and watching. I had to learn to love this part of the process if I was going to love riding the waves themselves.

               You likely see where I am going with this, but most of life is waiting, watching, and paddling too. The Christian life is built around the foundations of the ordinary means of grace. I want to emphasize ordinary. God has established ordinary things for the dissemination of grace to His people, for the equipping of the saints of God. Among those ordinary means are Bible reading, listening to sermons, attending church, serving in church, engaging in fellowship, prayer, fasting, the Lord’s Supper, and the witnessing of baptisms (or baptism itself if you’ve yet to be baptized). These ordinary means are the necessary fundamentals to Christian sanctification – they are waiting, watching, and paddling. Without them, you and I will both be useless to the King when He does send a wave He wants us to get on.

               I was sitting in one of my favorite coffee shops on island (after a beautiful morning session of surfing) – Surfer’s Coffee in Wahiawa – and overheard two men talking about their faith. They were disparaging some church, whose name I did not catch, for being too focused on the Word. One even went so far as to say that we are in the “third testament now” and are essentially supposed to be writing the next chapters of the Bible. They kept bringing up miraculous or highly spiritual events, healings, casting out demons, ecstatic activities. The one man kept talking about “power” and what was coming and the need for power. I regret I did not have the heart to engage them in their conversation, though I am convicted that I should have. What he seemed to mean by power is really just the equivalent of a kind of magical obsession – lame walk, blind see, demons flee. But what does the Word say is the power of God? “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16) The Gospel is the power of God unto salvation. And if we are going to discuss miracles, there is no greater miracle than the regeneration of an eternally dead soul to the new creation of a Son of God.

               What good a healthy body if the soul dies? What good to be free from demons if you are not then surrendered to the Holy Spirit – lest many demons return to take up residence (Matthew 12:43-45)? What good to see the beauty of God’s creation with the eyes but be ever blinded the beauty of His person through blindness of the Spirit? Rather than seeking temporal miracles, ought we not instead pursue the truly potent miracles of eternity – lives surrendered wholly to Christ? Of course, and the miracle of the Lord’s Gospel is that there is might which He has placed in the mundane, every day grace He has given us. He is our daily bread, our living water, the very breath in our lungs. Like all these things, we need Him daily, not in ecstatic overwhelming miraculous experience (though those waves do arise), but in the waiting, the watching, and the paddling of the ordinary means of grace. Harnessing the might of the mundane, the overt power of the ordinary, is the real key to the greatest walks of life with the Lord. Men of constant prayer, study, service and fellowship, are men who move the kingdom not by their own miraculous might, but by the grace of our glorious Father.

               So, we may as well learn to enjoy the seemingly monotonous in knowledge that it is building toward something beautiful for the Lord. Let’s get paddling.