At Sea

On Christmas Day 2021, around 10 p.m., I sat at the top of our stairs, letting my eyes drift over the scattered toys and scraps of leftover wrapping paper, to the Christmas tree, and finally, to our fireplace mantel. Everyone else in the house was sleeping peacefully as I carefully considered each souvenir that adorned the centerpiece of our Christmas decor: a hand-painted glass ball made for me by my mother, the stocking hangers that spelled out the word “Peace,” a tiny wooden tree with numbered advent decorations, and Santa in his sleigh, all sitting atop a bed of cotton snow with twinkling lights woven in.

My kids and I had worked on decorating the mantel all season long, deciding which decorations to display, rearranging them, and adding the snow and lights bought at the thrift store. But now, looking at the mantel was making me feel melancholy for some reason. A tiny voice inside my head whispered, “Where will all these Christmas decorations be next year?” And I realized the aching feeling I was experiencing could best be described as “at sea.”

You see, we had celebrated the previous Christmas as long-term guests in my husband’s parents’ home, where we lived for seven months during the pandemic. The year before that, we spent Christmas in Billerica, Massachusetts, and the year before that in Blacksburg, Virginia. I wanted to know, with certainty, where my family would be when Christmas 2022 rolled around, but the only thing I knew was that our lovingly created Christmas mantel wouldn’t be displayed in that rental house. Would it be in Alaska or some other state I’d never even visited? The remote work my husband had been doing would be ending in a few months, so I knew that our near future would involve a job search and relocation, and the thought was daunting and overwhelming.

Like a ship tossed on the ocean, I felt adrift, having no control over the waves or tides that dictated my life. Until I felt another small nudge in my mind: “Maybe this is how Mary felt, too.”

And I thought of the nativity scene in a new way. I thought of the morning after Christ was born, wondering if Mary had looked around the stable and the animals who had welcomed her child into the world and wondered where she would be and who she would be with on her son’s first birthday. Did she feel a little nervous when it was time to flee to Egypt, where she’d never lived before? Did she feel the heavy heart and anxiety that sometimes accompanies the addition of a new child? I think she must have.

The more I sat and pondered the phrase “at sea,” I thought about my Savior, Jesus Christ. For while the thought of being unmoored in a terrifyingly large body of water makes me uneasy, the Lord was comfortable at sea. His followers were fishermen, after all, so he spent a lot of time there. He wasn’t afraid of what the sea could do because He was in control of all of it.So while the waves raged and threatened, He napped.

The chorus of the hymn “Master, the Tempest is Raging,” reminds us, “No water can swallow the ship where lies the master of ocean and earth and skies!” He didn’t drift aimlessly on the water: He walked on top of it. And the hymn concludes: “Linger, O blessed Redeemer! Leave me alone no more, and with joy I shall make the blest harbor and rest on the blissful shore.”

It occurred to me that Mary looked down on her baby boy with some amount of trepidation about what the future might hold. Surely, she remembered and held fast to her faith that He was the Redeemer, and that the Lord had a plan for them and would guide their ship each day, no matter how turbulent the years ahead might be.

And I went to bed, feeling a little more secure in the knowledge that Jesus was at the helm of my ship.

Rachel Kenley Fry is a writer, a reader, and a stay-at-home mom to four amazing and exhausting kids. Much to her delight, her family is settled permanently in her childhood hometown of Palmer, Alaska. She is currently massively pregnant with baby number five and would prefer you not ask how many more weeks she has to share all the space between her ribcage and her pelvis, as the answer is “too many!” She is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.