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    Friends, I have decided that I want more out of 2001 than a sunburned back and bleached belly. So my new year’s resolution (or more accurately, the prayer of my heart) is: Depth and Peace. Calvin Miller’s book, Into the Depths of God (Bethany House, 2000) is launching me that direction.

    Miller stood on the Great Barrier Reef 50-60 miles out in the ocean — yet only ankle deep in water. He describes it as a safe place for snorkelers who paddle the shallows. But it is also a magnificent place for scuba divers to get far beneath the froth and thrashing of the surface, where they experience the awesome peace and beauty of the depths.

    But, says Calvin Miller, “In some ways it seems to me that much of Christianity is a conversation of snorkelers talking to each other of scuba experiences. If mere conversation or study groups were the paths to depth experience, the church would be deep indeed. But it is those who read and pray, not those who philosophize and chatter, who arrive at lives of real power.”

    “Snorkelers can use the language of divers, for the metaphors pass close. But they are not the same.” Amen, Calvin. How true! Indeed, I know some “scuba language” myself. But I want so much more. I long to experience what I talk so much about.

    Miller says of bathysphyere scientists, who descend into the heart of the oceans, “Hushed by the watery vastness, they learn a splendor they can never communicate to snorkelers ...No sound breaks the awesome silence of the ocean’s heart... The inscrutable glories of the deep cannot be described to those hooked on the safety of shallowness.”

It is those who read and pray ... who arrive at lives of real power.

    “Most Christians, however, spend their lives being whipped tumultuously through the surface circumstances of their days. Their frothy lifestyles mark the surface nature of their lives. Yet those who plumb the deep things of God discover true peace for the first time.. Deep is the gift of discipline.”

    So I am resolved to move toward ‘the deep’ and to seek ‘real peace,’ regardless of any other accomplishments. Of course, I want to do some things in 2001. But I am convinced that what I am is infinitely more important than what I accomplish. And I long to be a person of Depth and Peace.

    However, while I earnestly desire 2001 to be a year of Depth and Peace I must confess that I move into it feeling some fear mixed with my anticipation. Candidly, a part of me fears the depths. Or maybe I fear another attempt to go there. Failure in so many previous attempts leaves me wondering if yet another failed attempt might demoralize me irreparably.

    Yet — I “Seek, knock and ask” with warm anticipation. I cling, Oh Adonai, to your promises, “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.” And, “no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love Him.”

    So I plunge in Oh Lord. Please “grant me a willing spirit to sustain me.”