One day the light switch turned off. Or turned on, depending on your perspective.
There was this one day in Eleuthera.
I was there with a church youth group, the general goal of the trip being to evangelize impressionable young Bahamian kids via vacation bible school and impromptu pickup basketball games wherein we would simultaneously impress with our crossover skills and dexterity with the Romans Road (google it, suggested search terms: “romans road” + evangelize + gospel).
Periodically, our group would tear ourselves away from our Paul and Silas-ing to explore the coastline, which in general is a rocky display of raw tropical beauty.
On one such tearing away, we stumbled upon a remote beach on the eastern (i.e., open ocean facing) side of the island.
As I crested the dune, the first thing I saw was a tiny shelter, constructed of various pieces of palm fronds and loose branches just above the tide line.
Lounging under it were a handful of friendly-looking derelicts, taking a mid-afternoon break out of the sun’s harsh rays, like so many iguanas at a Mexican resort.
A couple of surfboards were strewn by their feet.
I looked seaward.
There, my teenage Floridian eyes were greeted with the sight of a perfect right-hander, reeling off down a reef that as far as I was aware had no name and maybe had never been surfed other than by the hut dwelling derelicts.
I was, of course, board less, schlepping a thruster being frowned upon when spare luggage space was dedicated to giveaway New Testaments rather than fruits of the flesh.
“Hey, howzit,” called one of the derelicts.
“Very well sir, how are you,” I said in my most mannered preacher kid speak, having been taught to treat every derelict as if they were possibly an angel in disguise.
“This spot is beautiful. And that wave looks pretty nice.”
“Yeah, man,” he said. “It’s sweet. You surf??”
“Try to,” I laughed. “But left my board back home in Florida.”
“No problem, man,” he responded enthusiastically, “you can borrow my stick if you want to give it a go.”
“You sure?” I asked, hardly believing this small slice of providential intervention.
I mean, if you did the math on the odds of my being on a random youth trip and turning down a random unpaved road to end up on a random off the grid beach that just happened to feature a random unknown reef break that had been discovered by a handful of random derelict surfers who happened to be napping instead of surfing and also happened to be willing to share boards with a random stranger who they’d never witnessed in the surf, not to mention surf over a shallow reef very capable of taking major bites out of the rails and nose of said board — that had to be god, right??
Or at least that was the “let’s measure the odds and credit god with anything that appears statistically improbable” style of thinking that pervaded the particular brand of American protestantism I was raised in.
But I didn’t dwell long on thoughts of the divine.
“Of course, man, here you go,” said the derelict, as he pushed to his knees and offered me his blade.
I took it, reverentially.
It had a little more volume than the slim sleds I was used to, but I was in no mood to nitpick — there was a perfect right hander peeling behind me, and I was gobsmacked at the good fortune of having anything at all to ride.
I turned and looked hopefully at our youth pastor, his blessing the last hurdle to cross before I could paddle out.
He looked at me.
But it wasn’t a look of blessing.
Instead, he was green with envy.
He was a surfer, too, and I could tell he was burning with jealousy at my good fortune.
I looked back at the derelict.
“Hey sir, do you mind if we borrow two boards?”
“Sure, man,” he replied, “help yourself.”
Approximately one minute and thirty seconds later, I was sitting in the lineup, or at least what I thought was the lineup, there being no markers beyond the reef under my dangling feet and my youth pastor bobbing nearby.
As fortune would have it, my lineup estimation was pretty good.
When the first set approached, I gauged the depths of the shadows on the face (as best as one can when the face is translucent), took a few quick paddles further out, spun, dug deep, and soon felt that glorious surge when you know you’re in.
I sprang to my feet in a low crouch, back knee tucked, angling down the face of a crystal clear wall, fingertips trailing, reef and fish passing in high def less just below my toes.
The lip briefly curled over me, and as I peered under the curtain a liquid wall of aquarium-like glass stretched out before my widening eyes like a literal wet dream.
I came out, pumped once, and then let the extra foam do its blessed work.
I stood motionless, a full steeze stance but with no thought of what was or wasn’t cool.
I was simply mesmerized by the perfect wave and virgin reef, so clear below my feet it was as if only air was between us.
I had no more thoughts of god.
Just bliss, as perfect of a natural communion between swell and man as my scrawny 16-year-old self had ever experienced.
The wave eventually spent itself in a narrow channel, and I kicked out, paddling languidly back to where my youth pastor sat.
I was ecstatic.
My youth pastor, not so much. He was a bigger guy, and generally rode longer shapes, so even on a board with a little more foam than I was used to he was clearly feeling undergunned and bogging as he tried to navigate the marker-less lineup.
Which was great. Because I had my pick of the sets, and I didn’t hold back.
It was glorious.
If there was a moment to crystallize my nascent spiritual belief system, that was it.
Nature, beauty, board gifting angels in disguise, empty tropic lineups, a surf session wrapped up in a missionary journey, the moment had it all, providentially speaking.
But nope.
I saw plenty of beauty, and I felt like I was having a road to Damascus moment.
But it wasn’t god speaking to me and robbing my sight of earthly visions.
Rather, I heard the dulcet tones of a foaming ocean cascade, I saw a parade of fluorescent fish capped by an azure sky, I felt nature’s energy under my feet and on my fingertips as I caressed glistening lips.
I was buzzing along the crest of a different type of worship.
The session only lasted an hour or so before my youth pastor hailed me in.
I handed the board back to the derelict angel, thanking him profusely.
“Whoa, yeah man, no problem at all,” he said, “you caught some good ones out there!”
“Best session of my life,” I gushed, “I just can’t thank you enough.”
He winked at me slyly.
“Hey man,” he said, “we surf bros have to stick together, amiright?!”
After that trip, I went on to (much) more spiritual stuff — bible college, koine greek classes translating the New Testament from its original language, work for a religiously-motivated nonprofit, dutiful membership in various “bible believing” churches.
But the seed took root that day on Eleuthera.
The more I learned, the more I read, the more I thought, the more I experienced, I was moving forward, but really everything was pointing backward to that moment, even though I didn’t consciously realize it.
Then, one day the light switch turned off.
Or turned on, depending on your perspective.
I just quit believing.
As in, belief just evaporated, seemingly into thin air.
Not for any reason in particular.
Sure, I had wrestled with all the big questions – the problems of pain and evil, the supremacy of natural explanations for allegedly metaphysical phenomena, and the peculiarly Christian challenges to belief, such as the fact that Jesus never seems to claim divinity in the Synoptics and that evidentiary support for the resurrection is generally circular and self-referential.
But it wasn’t any of these that pushed me over the edge (or lifted me above it, again, depending on your perspective).
The more I thought about the “why,” the more it occurred to me that my god journey was really just a natural evolution from that day skimming above a Bahamian reef, being fully present in a moment where my existence boiled down to water, sky and a well-planed craft under my feet, realizing that moments like those could be all sustaining.
Or to put it more eloquently, “the supreme good is like water, which nourishes all things without trying to.”
And no, my youth pastor (somehow) didn’t manage to catch any memorable waves that day.
But he still believes in god.