When Words of Comfort Fail
There are moments in life when suffering doesn’t knock—it overwhelms.
It doesn’t ask permission. It comes in waves, one after another, until strength is gone and breath feels scarce.
The psalmist knew that place:
“Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.” (Psalm 42:7)
This is not poetic exaggeration. This is the language of someone who feels submerged. Trapped. Overpowered… overwhelmed.
It is what heartache feels like when words of comfort fail. It is what illness feels like when the answer you longed for doesn’t come. It is what despair whispers deep within when all hope seems gone.
Surviving the Waves
I understand that language more personally than I ever wanted to. Years ago, I drowned in the ocean.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
It had been storming violently for several days. Finally, I could no longer stay cooped up in the tiny cottage on the beach, so I put on my bathing suit and ran to the shore.
The waves crashed hard against me relentlessly as I walked out into the water. I swam out further and further, determined not to let Mother Nature beat me. In my impatience, I forgot just how powerful she can be.
The waves pounded me again and again with unrelenting force, as if determined to remind me how powerless I was. I fought them until there was nothing left in me. My strength gave out. My lungs could wait no longer for a breath.
As I sank beneath the crashing water, the last thing I remember seeing was Denice—far off on the shore—straining to see me, calling my name, helpless to reach me.
The realization I was about to die and enter eternity filled my mind in a flash… but along with it came a peace—a peace that filled my entire being. My life did not sweep before me; only a peace that passes understanding. I was about to see Jesus face to face.
Then a question: “Is this all you wanted for me to do?”
Just before I opened my mouth to take my last breath—one filled with seawater, not air—I heard a soft and gentle whisper… not loud, not urgent, not even commanding:
“Say my name.”
I didn’t form a prayer. I didn’t quote Scripture. I didn’t even summon faith.
I simply said His name in my heart: Jesus.
And that is the last thing I remember.
A friend later told me he had been standing on a sandbar some distance away. He said I came out of the water as if I had been shot from a cannon. He reached out, and my right hand fell into his. I was unconscious, but I lived to tell the story.
Deep Calls to Deep
When I read Psalm 42 now, I don’t read it from a distance. I read it from experience:
“All your waves and breakers have swept over me.”
The psalmist doesn’t say life’s waves. He says your waves. That matters. He isn’t accusing God. He’s acknowledging something deeper—that even when everything feels out of control, God has not lost sight of us… nor has He left us.
What strikes me most is what comes next:
“By day the Lord directs his love, at night his song is with me—a prayer to the God of my life.”
The storm hasn’t ended. The waves are still crashing. But something has changed.
A Presence has entered the suffering.
This is where real hope lives—not in quick answers or shallow assurances, but in the quiet reality that God meets us in the deep, not just after it. He enters our suffering and walks with us through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. I was in that valley, but I was not alone—Jesus walked with me.
Sometimes faith doesn’t look like confidence.
Sometimes it doesn’t look like victory.
Sometimes it doesn’t even look like words.
Sometimes faith is reduced to a name spoken underwater.
If you are reading this and feel overwhelmed—by grief, illness, fear, or despair—hear this gently: feeling submerged does not mean God is absent. Being overwhelmed does not mean you are faithless. It means you are human.
The God who whispered to me beneath the waves still whispers today. And if all you can do is say His name, that is enough.
Deep still calls to deep. He is only a whisper away.