Washed up on the shores of heaven. (Part 2)

Washed up on the shores of heaven

Part 2: The grace of God will bring us home

I hope you can see that I am a fan of grace! So, what about this particular image?

I think the meaning is that, even if we should somehow – spiritually speaking – suffer ship-wreck, whereby the whole vessel of our being is ruined and sunk, so that we are utterly lost, incapable of achieving anything at all – except to be drowned and lost, instead of being lost we will find ourselves – against all the odds, against all hope, utterly miraculously as it were, finding ourselves not lost, not dead, not simply temporarily given reprieve, as though clinging to a rock and hoping something will come along to rescue us. Rather, as we come to on the beach, we discover that we are exactly at the place that we have been heading for all our lives. Perhaps we thought that we were far, far away, perhaps we despaired of ever getting there. Perhaps we thought that with much striving and effort and time we might possibly draw near to our dear destination. But instead, we find that, even if we should, to our minds, find ourselves ship-wrecked and going down for the third time, we discover that we are not lost, but found, not alone, but firmly in the embrace of God, not far off, but home. Deeply home, the home that we have always longed for, the home where we are completely and utterly at home, at peace, at rest, at one with all whom we love, at one with the God of love, who by his grace has brought us safely here. Regardless of the chances and pitfalls of life, of success and failure, of our efforts to get there, or to go astray, heedless of the apparently immensely powerful forces that might sweep us away and against which we sometimes felt powerless, it turns out that none of that counted for anything. This is not fatalism or destiny; this is simply the power of God’s grace to achieve our salvation, to make us whole, to complete us by his love, to bring us, at the last, completely and forever to be with him. I nearly said that all that we need to do is trust in him, but even that is not so. The fullness of the power of grace to bring us safe home is that, even if we should deny him, betray him, turn away from him, so it seems to us, even from the depths of our souls, there is something even deeper that we cannot see but that God can. Having once loved him and, perhaps, and I think this must be true, him having once loved us, even deeper than the complete rejection and failure of our faith, there is still the grace of God within us. And because of this we will find ourselves washed up on the shores of heaven.