When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.

When you're in ministry, you have to find ways to rest and recharge. Most of my pastor-friends golf. I don't own a set of clubs, so I hang out at Mount Saint Benedict Monastery instead. Last evening's spirituality program was a reflection on the life of Thea Bowman, a remarkable African-American nun who radiated love for God and other people. Music was an important expression of Sister Thea and we were treated to a performance on videotape.

It was an old Negro spiritual called (I think) Wade in De Water, and it contained a lot of imagery from Isaiah 43: "When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you." The song connected with me because I very much feel lost in the current of life these days.

Sister Thea described God as the one who troubles the waters to move us out of complacency and into another stage of development. That just blew me away. Over this last year I've seen the troubling as something to be overcome; I've pictured God as a neglectful lifeguard content to let me go under for the third time while he suns himself on his perch. But God himself stirring up the water for a purpose was something that had never crossed my mind. Where is God stirring up the water in my life? What am I learning in the midst of all this churning? What current does he seek to place me in? Will I fight the current or go with it? So much of the misery in my life seems to stem from wanting to wait out the troubling so I can stay exactly where I'm at.

We had a time of meditation where we sat in a circle and Sister Carolyn shared some words from A Retreat With Thea Bowman and Bede Abram: Leaning on the Lord. Then we sang a Children Go Where I Send Thee as a group, with a couple of us at a time going into the middle of the circle to "wade" our hands in a bowl of water. I went up with Cal, a Presbyterian minister and author that I had met at dinnertime.

The evening made me think of a quote by Bruce Lee, but I was too embarrassed to share it with anyone: "Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend."