Work brought me to the banks of this iconic American river this week. The Mississippi winds and turns its way through the middle of our country for over 2300 miles from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. It is one of the busiest commercial waterways in the world. The main artery for the blood flow of a nation. It has inspired more stories and poetry and songs than could ever be counted. As I sit here watching it drift lazily by me, an old man gazing on an old river, I find myself pondering the river of life.
You begin small, formed by the two tributaries that came before you. You are shallow and needy at first, in want of constant input. But you grow quickly. You begin to pick up speed, and you are a little wider and deeper. Soon you become rapids, swift and sure. You have no time to stop. You must push on to a destination. Where? You have no idea. It does not matter, as long as it isn’t here.
Now you are your own river, wider, and perhaps a little deeper, but still fast and confident. But you keep finding yourself off course. You want to head due south but keep finding yourself miles to the east, then miles to the west. You are still heading generally south, but it all seems so inefficient, all this meandering. It is taking too many miles and too much time to get there. To get where?
Now you are fully grown, wide and strong. But people begin to dam you up, to harness your energy. They divert you and use you and distract you. They want you to meet their needs, they slow you down. Sometimes you seem to be making no progress at all. You begin to pass through storms. The storms add to your volume but leave you muddy and wrecked. You accumulate trash and flotsam. You no longer look sleek and fast. Where did it all go wrong? You want to go back and undo all those wrong turns; to tear down the dams that frustrated your progress. To steer around the storms that made such a mess of you.
Then one day you are more than 2000 miles old. You are no longer fast, but you are powerful, because you are much deeper and a mile wide. You can carry more weight on your surface now. Large ships use you to bring goods and services to others. But you do not mind, because you have learned. You have learned something about all those miles and all those turns. They were never about you. You were made to be a channel, a conduit for life to others. Your surface was there for others to travel on; your bounty and your energy a provision for all the faces on the shore you passed by. You feel embarrassed about all your complaints and ingratitude. But the past, where you have been and what you have seen, can never be changed. So, you glide on.
You have learned that the sovereignty of God is not about a moment in time. It is about his power and wisdom stretched over decades, steering a river that does not wish it. It is about his ability to gather up all the mistakes, the meanderings, the misfortunes; all the presumption, the pain, the failure; all the sin in a soul and in a 2000-mile lifetime and use it all to bring a river where it needs to be, with him. The patience of God is frightening. The kindness of God is crippling.
You wish you could go back upstream a thousand miles and tell that muddy river that it is going to be ok, but he would not hear you, agony is deaf. Or go further back and tell that young rushing river what you have learned. But you know he would not listen. He already knows everything, and he is in a hurry. To go where?
The sun is setting now, and you are slower and wider than you have ever been. You can here the gulls calling to you. They have been calling to you your whole life, making you ache for the sea. You will be poured out soon. You know it will not be the end, but the beginning. Soon you will be far larger and deeper than you ever imagined.
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”
- Heraclitus
“The river has great wisdom and whispers its secrets to the hearts of men.”
– Mark Twain