Stay with me, this may take a while. I fish. I fish a lot. The bays I fish in exist because Texas has barrier islands that create all sorts of coves, inlets, lakes and bays. Many of these places are connected not by open water but by small cuts. Imagine a stream anywhere from 10 to 20 feet wide and you have the picture. To navigate these cuts and the lakes they connect you need a boat that can run in as little as 6 inches of water. You can get around in boats that don’t run that shallow but you may find yourself parked on a sand bar somewhere. My boat can handle five full-grown men and get the job done, but there is still the danger of running aground.

Now imagine yourself running 30 miles an hour, along one of these cuts which never run straight, hoping you can keep the boat between the banks and not find a sandbar or a crab trap or a boat coming from the other direction to ruin your day.

That’s the feeling I get in life a lot of the time. I’m running along hoping not to hit anything that will ruin my day. The trouble is I hit stuff all the time.

Six months ago my wife’s dad tragically died. There is no way to explain it. There are no answers. It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t add up, and it doesn’t go away. The whole family ran head long into an obstacle that didn’t give an inch.

We are people of faith so we go on. We know all the biblical truth but that doesn’t fix it. We know we will see him again, but that doesn’t change the pain of today. We mourn, we pray, we support each other, we get angry, we cry, we get frustrated, we ask questions and we get up, go to work and slug our way through another day. In other words we get back in the boat, get it up on plane and start looking out for the next sand bar.

In all of this, God shows up. He’s here, he hurts with us, he does more then watch, he’s present, but he doesn’t make the pain go away, he doesn’t fix things and he doesn’t tell us there won’t be another sand bar to run into. The fact is he promises to be there the next time and every time we run into something.

So we’re back in the boat amazed by God’s work in creation and in us, knowing that when the next obstacle appears, we will survive and we won’t be alone.