Today’s Scripture Reading (October 18, 2016): 2 Chronicles 15
Have you ever made an ocean dive? I heard a story recently told by a mother of five – she had three girls and two boys. And the family was growing up, as families do. And so one day her husband came up with a great idea – as all husbands do. Wouldn’t it be a great idea to learn to dive as a family? Diving could be a great bonding experience. And the dream wasn’t to just dive in a pool or a lake. Dad wanted to learn to dive so that the family could go and dive in the ocean. Now, all Mom knew about the ocean was that, unlike in a small hometown lake, in the ocean, there were animals that would eat you. So Mom is not at all enthused about going diving with the family.
So she decides to get the kids on her side, and that would stop the process in its tracks. So first Mom went to the boys. And she knew that she had a bit of an uphill fight here, but she had the story planned – complete with music from that documentary - Jaws. And it worked. By the time she had finished the presentation with the guys, they were sure that the last thing that they wanted to do was go diving with the family.
Mom moved on to the girls, and maybe her experience with her sons had made her just a little overconfident. So she walked into where her daughters were and just opened with the words “Your Dad wants us to take diving lessons so that we can dive as a family.” Unexpectedly, a cheer went up in the room, and the girls were doing the dance of joy. Mom, on the other hand, knew that she had blown it – she had just lost the family vote which would forever be recorded as four against three.
So the family took diving lessons. First in a pool, and then in a lake and finally they worked themselves up to Dad’s dream of a dive in the open ocean. The day came, and the boat took them out to this place where they were going to do their first ocean dive – it would be a thirty-foot dive. They put their equipment on and then the dive master told them to let the air out of their air jackets, and they would slowly begin to descend to their thirty feet depth. Except that she let the air out and nothing happened. When she was in the pool or the lake she had always descended, but not here. Here she stayed on the top of the water.
She thought that maybe she could swim to the thirty-foot depth where her people were waiting for her, but she couldn’t seem to get to them. The Dive Master noticed her struggle and came to her and said “I see you are having a buoyancy issue,” which Mom says is a nice way of saying “fat floats.” So he got weights out of the boat – and he had to get a lot of weight out of the boat. But finally, she was weighted down enough that she began to descend to her people.
That was when Mom saw the shark. She had seen the documentary (Jaws) and knew exactly what that meant. She frantically tries to get the attention of her tribe, but they are all ignoring her. Finally, she gets the attention of her youngest daughter, and she sees what it is that mom sees, and the family begins to understand that they are in danger and they decide it is time to get out of the water. But now they are having a struggle trying to surface. That’s when mom remembers her super power. She undoes the weights and lets them drop and all in a sudden the family is traveling toward the surface of the water. They pop up above the water line like a cork and then scramble as fast as they can out of the water and onto the boat.
Surprisingly, the master of the dive was not all that enthused. He sat the mother and her family on the side of the boat, in kind of a diving time out and said, “Do you know what you did wrong? You took your eyes off of me. Never take your eyes off of the master of the dive. I know you saw a fish that you thought was a shark. But it wasn’t. In fact, the fish that you saw doesn’t even have any teeth. It was totally harmless. And if you were watching me, you would have known that.”
Asa has had some success. But God needs to remind him that his success had been wholly because Asa had drawn close to God. If Judah was going to succeed, they needed to make sure that they were focused on God. The promise was simple, if you look for God, he will be found. But it is when we lose sight of him that things start to get messed up.
He is the Master of Dive. The Master of the Dive isn’t hiding somewhere where he can’t be found. He is looking over the aspects important to where we are. And the best results always occur when we decide to keep our eyes on him.
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