River wide

I like running by the river. I find it clearer thinking there. The wide expanse of the water, the clear air, the blood pumping with the exercise. It feels good. Reese Witherspoon, in a dizzying display of logic in the film “Legally Blonde” explains it : “Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don't shoot their husbands. They just don't....” ( ** love that quote)

Today I ran as far as the NATO Summit perimeter fence and back again. Excuse me, Mr Obama, aside from the many other things they may accuse you of, you have chopped at least 2 km off my morning run and kept me and everyone else from a lovely part of the riverbank by the Atlantic Pavilion and the Oceanarium!

So why am I happy today? ( I mean apart from the endorphins ) Why do I feel like rejoicing? Well, the wide expanse of water matched with what I had read in the Bible earlier on in the morning from Romans and Isaiah ***

“Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!” screams out Paul. “How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!”—And Isaiah writes : “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways”, declares the Lord. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Somehow, the river, with its vast clear expanse to the other side this morning, is a good image of all this, as I run by. Here at the edge the water is agitated, shallow and brown with mud and sediment. My thoughts. Out there, its clear and it runs deep and it is steady in its course to the sea. God’s thoughts. Or rather, you have to go right out down to the ocean, past Alges and Belem and plumb its deeps to get even a tiny understanding of the dimension of Gods thoughts and love.

A children’s chorus I used to sing many many years ago has got it theologically corrects.

Wide, Wide as the ocean. High as the heavens above

Deep, Deep as the deepest sea, is my Saviour’s love...

**http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Coemj2qdWMw&feature=related

*** Rom. 11:33; Isa. 55:8, 9