...my kind of river

Like a river glorious is God’s perfect peace,

Over all victorious in it’s bright increase;

Perfect, yet it floweth fuller everyday,

Perfect, yet it groweth deeper all the way.

---Frances R. Havergal, 1874

I have never floated on the Mississippi River, but I’ve read Huckleberry Finn. There is a vivid description of the river that stays with me. Huck and Jim are floating on their raft down the river, intending to veer into the Ohio where it joins the Mississippi. Neither had ever seen the Ohio, or that part of the Mississippi; when they realized that the time for paddling hard upstream of the Ohio was nigh, it was obvious that the river was too wide, too deep, too inexorable to fight against.

I thought of this passage when I read the hymn text for today. This river of God’s peace? It’s no shallow, meandering, drought-sickened rivulet. This river, this peace, is a powerful force, growing ever deeper and fuller in its completeness. This peace is not a resigned, mousy resignation to the ‘true’  powers in the world. It is the force that is able to sustain life, overpowering the unrest, the injustice, the terror in the world with its current. This peace is the true force to be reckoned with.

That’s my kind of river.

...to risk life

O Love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee;

I give Thee back the life I owe, that in Thine ocean depths

its flow may richer, fuller be.

---George Matheson, 1882

It’s hard to believe. Someone comes to you and says “Give up your riches to me. Blindly trust that I will take them and increase them.” And if this were an email solicitation, or a risky stock market offering, or a trench-coated fellow on a busy street corner, we know we’d be foolish to go along. No one wants to be scammed like that.

However, this is what God calls us to do. Here the hymnist imagines God as the personification of Love, a love that seeks us and pursues us, wraps us up and embraces us. This love calls to us, “Trust me. Turn over your life, which you may consider rich, full, and precious. In the depths of my life, your life becomes rich indeed. Entrust your life to me to achieve depth and meaning. You can rest here from your striving; here you are loved.”

This is a risk we can take, must take, if we are to live lives of meaning. Oh, to be found in the ocean of God’s love!