October 22nd 2008 marked my 60th lap around the sun. A big number that calls for reflection, which I do best in the ocean. On my way down the dirt path to the water, I thought of the best things in life: the birth of my first and only child, my second marriage, my love affair with surfing that started in February of 1961 and my conversion to Christianity in 1968. While births and marriages often conjure up similar memories for most everyone, surfing and Christianity, when given joint custody, probably do not.

Surfing was the first thing to deliver more than it promised to a child moving across the water at what seemed like great speed. Next it became an all-consuming international quest for better waves. After 40, it was about the glide. Now it’s about connecting to a chain of energy whose source can be traced to all beginnings. Coming to faith in Jesus Christ helped me understand those beginnings and so added to the joy of riding waves. Strange as it may seem to some, these two experiences are forever linked with me, and I am not always sure where one leaves off and the other starts.

Now don’t misunderstand, riding a wave is not a spiritual act in and of itself. In fact, when done competitively, it feeds egomania, a state apparently harmful to spiritual development. There’s something called “soul surfing,” which is really not about how good one surfs, or how they look to others. It’s about how it feels, offering a reward much deeper than plastic trophies and applause. Waves have been idols, but they have also taken me past idolatry, into a place very much like the best church experience.

Surfing is a long ways from being the most important thing in my life these days, and it doesn’t always wash away the dirt of the daily grind. But on my birthday, surfing delivered, pointing the way after I looked down in horror to see that there was more sand in the bottom of the hourglass than in the top of it.

A four-foot wave rose in the kelp and rolled toward me as the best birthday gift ever. I paddled to meet it, spun around, took two strokes and was up, turning, moving down the line. The wave steepened and formed an almond-eyed barrel that in years past I would have been limber enough to tuck myself into. Instead, I pumped twice off the bottom and rolled out fast until my fins were dragging in the sand. I was smiling without realizing it, happy without trying. That entire experience took a fraction of a minute, but in that time I had become younger, a child playing in the shallow end of God’s swimming pool. A dozen waves and an hour and a half later, and I was done for the day. Waves broke, salt dried on my skin, children laughed in the shore break, seagulls dived for food. Standing in a shallow tide pool, I was ageless, offering a silent prayer as a set of waves peel off, and a kid took off and ripped several big turns before hitting the lip. Someone would ride the energy of the same wave all the way through San Diego and far down into Baja, until that which had been born in violence would die alone and satisfied on some distant shore.