Relentless

On vacation in Portugal, my husband and I watched a marriage disintegrate in real time.

The breakfast buffet at our hotel was expansive and elaborate; couples wandered down in the mornings to peruse a bewildering variety of Portuguese pastries, sausages, and cheeses, and to sip espressos and muse over plans for the day.

She came down first, sat at the table for four; he after her, for long enough to sling his bag over the back of his chair, and then stood.  “Well!  Shall we?”

She glanced up, grimaced.  “Sit down.  They’re not here yet.”

“Oh, it’s fine,” he said, clearly jovial.  “We can go ahead and get started.  Do you want me to get you anything?”

“No,” she snapped. And then: “This isn’t a feeding trough—”

But he hadn’t heard her for he had already wandered down to the pastries, where he worked his way through and made a plate and came back carrying a fluted glass full of orange juice.  “Here,” he told her sweetly, settling in with his plate, “I got you a mimosa.”

“I don’t want it.  I already told you that you should wait.”

He glanced at her, surprised, then went on eating as if nothing had happened.  After a moment of expectant silence, she said: “I just really can’t believe you.  I literally asked you to sit down and wait—”

He put down his fork, sighed.  “I don’t know why you care if I—”

“We have guests joining us for breakfast.  It’s rude for you to eat before they get here.  And I deliberately asked if you could wait, and you just wanted food, it had to be about you, so you get up and ignore me—”

He pushed his plate away.  “Well, I don’t understand why we always have to do things a certain way for other people.  We’re not other people.  We’re here to enjoy ourselves.  We don’t have to do things the way other people do them.  I wanted breakfast.”

“It’s so rude, and if you cared about me you’d—”

He continued, trying to keep his voice down.  “There isn’t any need to be absolutist.  Look at that couple over there.” He waved a fork at us as my husband and I tried to disappear into the wallpaper.  “They’re having a good time.  Can’t we?  Can’t we just be happy and enjoy ourselves?”

She stood up from the table.  “I’m trying to open up this dialogue with you, to get us to a better place, and you always do this—belittle me, explain things away…”

He made a disgusted sound and speared his sausage.  She stared at him for two awkward beats, waiting for an apology or a conversation that clearly wasn’t going to materialize, and then shoved her empty plate away and left the table.  When their guests arrived twenty minutes later, she still hadn’t returned.

My husband gawked.  “Wow,” he said after a minute, once he returned to his breakfast again.  And then: “That was a crazy argument over a breakfast buffet.”

But it wasn’t about the buffet.  Arguments like that never are.  The buffet was just a metaphor for whatever broiling resentments and seething frustrations had been left to simmer, unaddressed, and that eventually boiled over in a horrifying way at a hotel in front of another astonished married couple.  The argument about the buffet is an argument about longstanding patterns and hurts, built up over time.

The greatest changes, schisms, and fissures happen invisibly over years and years and years.

I had time to think about this in a different way earlier in the trip, walking a beautiful wild Atlantic beach.  Some of the beaches in Portugal are for play: smooth aqua water, white sand, and rafts and boats and paddleboards galore.  This one was not.  It was wild, all frothing whitecaps and rocks jutting out of the sea, dotted with signs in Portuguese warning of dangerous rip currents.

I stood in wonder, watching the waves crash in.  “The sea always wins,” said my husband.

He’s right.  The strongest rocks can’t withstand the relentless tide.  And as much as we might build artifices to avoid it, the sea overcomes and overwhelms them—if not now, over long years, over decades.  The ocean can change the face of the earth even if, in a given day, a wave doesn’t appear to be doing much of anything at all.

“The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness,” 2 Peter reminds us.

But we do count the Lord as slow.  Days come and days go and on most of those days, perhaps a singular miraculous thing does not occur.  The one incident, the change that we prayed for would happen or would not happen seemed to be unaddressed.  We perceive silence.  We perceive inaction.  We ask God to do something, and we think that He doesn’t, that He is making us wait, that nothing is happening at all.

But under surface, grain by grain, the shore is changing.  God is relentless.

God doesn’t reckon time the way we do; God doesn’t prioritize the way we do; God is working in His time and in His way, which is right always, and also always beyond our comprehension.  This is what faith is: believing that the ocean will alter the rock even if I only see one wave come in at a time.   Knowing that when the fullness of the transformation is made manifest, I will be astonished.

On the very first leg of our trip, on the small regional carrier meant to ferry us from one city to another before ferrying us out of the country, the pilot told us to buckle up.  “Good afternoon,” he told us, “we’re expecting some severe turbulence on the way, so please buckle up—”

Are you kidding me, I thought, staring dully out the window.  I did not run screaming off the plane. The anti-anxiety meds, fortunately, were kicking in.  This happens every single time I step on a regional carrier.  I fear flying.  I hate turbulence.  And yet.  And yet!  Read my past blog posts and you will see I have lived this exact experience several times over.  You’d think once was enough.

Generally, my response is to either withdraw into a tiny ball and pray—God help God help God help God stop it God make it stop God smooth the flight God calm the plane—or to grab my husband’s hand and do the same. Occasionally I get very resentful at God for making me deal with this when He knows how much I hate it.

But for whatever reason, as the plane took off and rattled and bobbed and weaved its way to our destination, I locked my gaze on the window and the wing of the plane that was not moving much—a reminder we would not fall out of the sky—and took deep, long breaths.  And what popped into my mind was nothing like a prayer but more like a simple truth:

God is here.  God is here.  God is here.

In and out, like the ocean tide.  Imperturbable, immovable, relentless presence.  Something is happening.  Something is always happening, moving.  The Spirit is here, always, acting, always, giving and translating, shaping and moving, always.

I can’t see it.  I don’t have to see it. I already know what I know: that the work of God is inevitable.