Youth work can be a bit like surfing: a lot of effort without much reward. But – as international author and speaker Danielle Strickland says – the wave is worth it, and, in time, we can learn to love the waiting too.
I remember visiting Australia and going to Bondi Beach in Sydney – famous for its surf. I walked into a rental place on the beach and asked for a surfboard. Once they quizzed me and realised I had only ever seen surfing done in films (I am an avid fan of Point Break and Blue Crush) they relegated me to a boogie board and told me to stay between the flags. I was crushed. My hopes for surfing were dashed but I wasn’t destroyed – I still embarked on the boogie board of a lifetime. By that I mean I almost died trying to ‘body surf’. After a few hours of being pummeled by the sheer magnitude of the power of the ocean, and the riff of the waves, I took a break and talked to a real surfer on the shore.
I asked him the secret to good surfing. What he told me was more than information – it was revelation. He told me that the secret to great surfing was working and waiting. He expressed that this is hard to swallow when you’ve been lured by the story of the ‘wave’. Surfers are in love with the wave – the moment when all the working and the waiting culminates in this incredible force greater than yourself which is harnessed and used to propel you into an anti-gravitational experience that suspends time. In other words, what happens when they actually catch a wave is: ‘Epic, dude.’ And it really is. Have you ever watched it? It’s magical.
On the beach that day I realised something really important: ministry is just like surfing. Christian leaders are like surfers. We really are. We are in love with the wave. Or in other words – the moment when God shows up. It is indescribable. I remember the first time someone actually decided to follow Jesus after I told them about the good news that he wanted to save them. It was like time was suspended, all of Earth stood still and God descended and everything in me was completely and totally alive. And actually, that’s kind of exactly what happens.
The Bible has two words for time – chronos and kairos. Chronos is the measurement of time in quantity, or in other words, it’s the time we keep. Our calendars mark off chronos, our clocks keep us in the chronos variety and our lives revolve around the seconds, minutes and hours, days, weeks and years of chronos inevitability. Time ticks by. Most of our lives are spent that way. Working and waiting. And here’s the awful truth – most of the time for every hero, every reformer, every heroic Christian, every Bible character, every famous person who ever existed on the face of this time-trapped planet, is spent in chronos time. As my surfer friend explained, this is the working and waiting bit. It’s chronos baby. It’s quantity time. Seconds, adding up to minutes, adding up to hours and days and months and years… and it just seems like a lot of working and a lot of waiting. But then something happens.
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