This last week, we took the evening off from fishing and skiffed across the bay to another uninhabited island. On the way over, we found ourselves in the midst of a pod of fin whales, and rode with them, sat among them for minutes we didn’t count. My whole family in a single skiff, collectively breathing in the whalespouts, hearing their haunting pipes as they suck in air after the spout. With camera in hand I caught a rare glimpse of the whale’s eye and a part of its baleen.
We have done this every summer, several times a summer since my children were babies, and still, we gape, we gasp, we marvel again at the paradoxes they embody: the second largest of all animals, they gain their girth by consuming krill, the tiniest of foods. And that such ponderous bulk should move in water as agile and rhythmic as water itself. (They can swim up to 30 mph and are sometimes called “the greyhound of the seas.”)
The next day, I was sitting alone in my house, the rest of my family off working in the boats. I was reading the words of St. Paul recounting all that he had endured in his life: shipwrecked three times, stoned and left for dead, bit by a snake, imprisoned for years on end,who went about hungry, thirsty, even a few times without clothes. And after this catalog of woes, he writes, “I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why I delight in weaknesses . .. for when I am weak I am strong.” Paradox again.
Somewhere in these minutes, a knock sounded on my door. I startled. We rarely have unexpected visitors. Who boats to your faraway island in Alaska, and walks the long climb to your door and knocks? Who does not call on the radio first—or make plans for the trip out? A woman wearing Grundens and Xtra-tufs stepped gingerly into the room, looking both bewildered and hopeful. I stared at her face, sure that I knew her but I couldn’t find her name. Then----I knew. It had been more than six years since I had seen her, and she had changed greatly in that time. We embraced. She was working on a fishing boat in the area, she told me, and knew I lived on this island, though she had never been here before. She got permission from the skipper to skiff ashore to see me.
I cannot tell you about her life, except that she has lost all that she valued most: her family, her career, her sobriety, her reputation, her church, her faith. I thought of St. Paul.
We lamented her life, all she has seen and lost. We talked about the deepest, saddest things.
“But there is hope still,” I told her. “You can be that woman of integrity and honor again.”
She looked at me with tearful eyes, almost daring to believe.
Does she not know that the world is laced with the unexpected and impossible, that paradox is at the heart of who we are, and though it maddens us, we shall not survive without it?
We must be lost before we’re found.
Jesus came for the sick, not the well.
Though we are dead, we have been made alive.
If we would save our lives, we must lose them.
We are slaves to our own freedom, until we are freed to serve.
Once we were darkness; now we are children of light.
For when we are weak, we are strong . . ..
I say some of this to her, and I point to us. “How does this happen, Marya, that you come to this bay, that you knock on the door of my island, and we are here, together?”
We are lost before we’re found . . ..
And how does it happen that a lonely woman on a wilderness island who wants to serve others is brought a God-hungry visitor to her door?
When we are weak, we are strong . …
After an hour of tears and hope, with a Bible in her hand, she left, her boat pointing out into the bay, where the whales, big as houses, grow fat and fast from food too small to see. Impossible.
Like us,
So lost, so found, so hungry and lonely and bursting and joyful,
So weak,
So strong,
We can yet
do all we need to do, and more,
through Him
who loves and strengthens us.
I pray she will know this again.
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