The Longest Vigil

In 2007, researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute discovered a deep-sea octopus clinging to a rocky ledge nearly a mile beneath the Pacific. Over the next four and a half years, they returned again and again to find the same mother — a Graneledone boreopacifica — wrapped around her clutch of eggs in the cold darkness. For fifty-three months, she never left. She never ate. She spent every ounce of her strength keeping water flowing over those eggs, brushing away parasites, shielding them from predators. When the eggs finally hatched in 2011, the tiny octopuses drifted upward into the sea. Their mother, utterly spent, died.

She gave everything so they could live.

There is something in that image that catches in your throat, because it echoes the deepest truth the universe knows. "Greater love has no one than this," Jesus said, "to lay down one's life for one's friends." The God who designed a mother octopus to pour herself out completely is the same God who poured Himself out on a cross. Not reluctantly. Not halfway. Completely.

Sacrifice, real sacrifice, is never convenient. It costs the one who gives far more than the one who receives will ever fully understand. But here is the glory of it — what looks like an ending becomes a beginning. A mother's death becomes a hundred new lives. A Savior's death becomes life for the whole world.

What is El Shaddai, the Almighty, asking you to pour out today so that something new can live?