“You wrecked my world in a beautiful way. And I kinda thought that I’d always stay the same. But I heard that healthy things grow, and growing things change.”
Ben Rector (Wreck)
In The Grey Haven’s recently released 2025 EP “Where The Living is Deep”, the lyrics of the title track reflect on the nature of time as movement in space, evoking contrasting perspectives of the perception of the waters getting shallower and shallower as the past retreats and the future encroaches with the sought after conviction of the river running deep in the present.
I wanna be where the river runs deep, the lyric expresses, carrying notes of both lament and proclomation. If time is movement, the allegory of the moving river turns us towards the notion of life rather than death.
I wanna be where the livin is deep.
Somebody show me where.
Heaven knows where.
This is the longing of those driven to seek life in the rushing waters.
If the final line wonders about whether we “could finally be where the living is deep,” it leaves one to ponder what this means for the movement of time. Rather than evoking an image of anchoring ourselves in the deep waters so as to prevent time from moving forward (or us from moving forward in time), we instead find ourselves flowing with the waters as we watch the world around us change. Thus the invitation is to likewise consider the ways in which we change with it. To be in the river means that we cannot stay stationary.
And yet, to seek the living is to nonetheless seek something true, something trustworthy, something of eternal or infinite value. To find the deep waters that are able to carry us is to likewise anchor ourselves in this truth.
In her book Pause: Spending Lent With The Psalms, Elizabeth Caldwell notes a similar contrast of perspectives, writing in regards to the notion of seeking the face of God:
I’ve often thought that the youngest and the oldest people we know are the nearest to the presence of God’s spirit
It’s interesting to consider this within that image of the river the above song evokes. “Time is a look into the age old past,” the song goes. “Time is the future comin way too fast.”
Leaving one to wonder, as we float down this river called life, whether its just an inevitable march to shallow waters or whether this is all awakening us to something more than we can presently see.
This past summer I was able to check an item off my bucket list by finally visiting the headwaters of the Mississippi River. My wife and I had done the middle section of the Great River Road years ago, starting in Minneapolis and ending in Memphis, thus we still had both the headwaters and the mouth to do in order to complete the journey. With the mouth still on the list, visiting the headwaters was an eye opening experience, because looking at it you would never imagine such a thing, emerging from seemingly nothing, could go on to become the mighty river that carries so much history in its grip. This inconsequential trickle grows into something with incredible significance and storied presence.
To stand at the headwaters is to equally imagine where its all headed, to imagine the section of river I have yet to see and fully experience. With the current flowing in a single direction, there is an element of trusting that this marked beginning is flowing towards something, even if I can’t yet fully experience what that is. What I have in the present is the middle, a middle that has been shaped by the clarifying image of its source.
As Lent reminds us, in the present middle we have the incarnated Word of Jesus. In Jesus we can enter into the living of the present, the incarnation having broken into the middle of history as God’s revelation to the whole of creation. The great “wrecking” of this present order that reveals the beauty. In Jesus we enter into the deep waters that we intuitively and naturally seek in the rushing movement of time.
And yet, as Caldwell notes, “This is not so with God the Creator, who’s face is unknown.” Caldwell goes on to reflect that,
It is in that mystery (of the unknown face of God) that we are invited to engage..,
In context of the book it is an invitation to engage with Psalm 27. It can also be seen as an invitation to engage with the Reality of life, both in its source (the headwaters) and its definition (Jesus). As the Psalmist declares,
The Lord is my light and my salvation… Come, my heart says, seek God’s face (27:1;8)
Heaven knows where
This is the longing- To find God’s face in Jesus living in the present.
If, as the lyric by Ben Rector above notes, healthy things grow, and growing things change, what both sustains and informs this change is the singular reality of finding the deep waters of God’s salvation. All that changes, changes in Christ. All that flows, flows in Christ.
In her book Surprised by Paradox: The Promise of “And” in an Either-Or World, Jen Pollock Michel writes,
“As soon as we think we have God figured out, we will have ceased to worship him as he is
Thus the living, the being carried by the river in the deep waters of Christ, becomes a process of discovering more and more of God, and in doing so coming to know more and more of this world and ourselves. As the Psalmist declares “I have sure faith that I will experience the Lord’s goodness in the land of the living (27:13).” Caldwell is convinced that what Jesus breaks open is the truth that in the present, “God’s face is most completely seen when we see and acknowledge the faces of all whom God loves.” Or it could said, all THAT God loves. This is the goodness of God’s creation.
The “you” that wrecks our world is encountering God, and in this present reality where God’s face is yet uknown, God is found through the inbreaking of the incarnation, a reality that opens up the living to encountering God in the other. This is what the revelation of Jesus proclaims. The deep waters that we seek is the welcome invitation to participate in the living, and in the process of living finding ourselves changed, transformed.
And yet. Or better yet, still. We find these deep waters within the confidence of the rivers headwaters and the anticipation of its mouth. Change, transformation, it is rooted in something true and heading towards something true, something real. The living in the present is, in fact, the very thing that anticipates this coming reality. The Lord is my salvation- the future breaking into the present- declares that this participation finds its meaning not in the forces of change in and of itself, but in the ways this “wrecking” binds the change to a greater hope. The great ocean of God’s redemptive work awaits its consumation. For us in the present seeking the deeper waters of this promise, it has also been inaugerated in the resurrection of Jesus.
The Stories of my Life 