The Avoidance Illusion

when staying away from the water feels safer than trusting God in the depths

“The LORD sent a huge fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the stomach of the fish three days and three nights.” —Jonah 1:17

To be honest, I’ve always thought cruising was for the fearless, or just plain crazy. Staying on land, somewhere my feet can touch the ground, where I can see the edges of things, feels like survival 101 to me.

The ocean is an invitation to chaos, people! And my instinct is to politely decline. Who’s with me?

It’s not the ship itself, but what lies underneath it that scares me. All that unseen, unknown, hungry space, filled with creatures looking for a snack. Nightmare fuel!

So what am I doing here—on a seven-week cruise across the Atlantic that continues around Europe? Good question. Especially when the Atlantic is home to something like 30,000 species, many of which I’d prefer to never meet—and most of which have teeth, tentacles, or glow-in-the-dark something or other. Man, we don’t even know how close we are to terror.

Avoidance seems like the safer choice, doesn’t it? But, I know from experience that avoidance has a way of shrinking my life until there’s nothing left but my own little patch of barren ground filled with more weeds than new life. And is it bad that I want more life than weeds? So I choose, with trepidation, mind you, to let God steer me straight into the very waters I’d rather avoid, not to terrify me, but to teach me who’s in charge of the depths.

Let me just say what you’re already thinking: Jaws must have done a number on this girl! And you’re right. It doesn’t matter if it’s the ocean, a lake, or a swimming pool—my brain supplies the shark and the blood. If it swims below and has a mouth with teeth made for ripping flesh, my imagination has already cast it in my own personal horror movie.

It’s irrational. I know. My fear invents unlikely horrors and lives with them like a virtual reality I can never escape. Being eaten alive by a shark is statistically improbable, but fear doesn’t care about odds. It cares about possibility.

So I can’t imagine if the possibilities weren’t just in my head, but I actually found myself in a den of sharks, like Daniel in his den of lions. Fear in that instance wouldn’t be irrational, would it? For him, the enemy wasn’t in his head; it was pacing in the pit. His death wasn’t imagined; it was certain—except for one thing: God had a different plan.

Daniel didn’t survive because the threat was exaggerated. He survived because God’s power overruled it. As he reported, “My God sent his angel and shut the lions’ mouths, and they have not harmed me.” (Daniel 6:21-22).

Of course, God doesn’t promise to shut every mouth or block every bite, does he? But He does promise that nothing with teeth gets near his children without His permission. That means Daniel’s miracle isn’t just history—it’s a window into the way God rules over the terrors in our modern lives.

In this ancient but relevant work of God, I have come to recognize that the sharks in my mind – those worst-case scenarios with teeth – don’t get to choose me for dinner. God decides what they eat. That sounds crude, but it’s biblical. The lions didn’t get to choose Daniel as a snack. Jonah wasn’t swallowed because a fish got lucky. Both were held in terrifying places because God was doing something bigger than safety: He was displaying His sovereignty.

God doesn’t always keep us out of places that undo us. He doesn’t always steer us away from the ocean, the diagnosis, the deep grief, the place where our feet can’t touch the bottom. But He does promise that nothing there can touch us without His permission. “Acceptance of one’s lot,” JI Packer once said, “in the confidence that it is God’s gift, is the supreme virtue, the secret of peace,” and I want that peace.

That doesn’t mean I suddenly feel invincible. It means I am, you are, we all are, kept. Even if the jaws close around us, they only close because God allowed it. And if He allows it, then even the terror is tethered to His glory.

Which leaves me with the obvious elephant in the room: how did I ever agree to this cruising life if fear keeps trotting after me like a stray dog I never meant to feed? I guess it’s because sometimes the only way to learn who rules the deep is to step into it and let God prove fear wrong.

Want help in your own struggle with fear? Pick up Weightless, and take this journey with me.