Jeremiah 49:23

We little know what sorrow may be upon the sea at this moment. We are safe in our quiet chamber, but far away on the salt sea the hurricane may be cruelly seeking the lives of men. Hear how the death fiends howl among the cordage; how every timber groans as the waves beat like battering rams upon the vessel!

God help you, poor drenched and weary ones! My prayer goes up to the great Lord of sea and land, that he will make the storm a calm, and bring you to your desired haven! Nor should I offer prayer alone; I should try to benefit those hardy men who risk their lives so constantly.

Have I ever done anything for them? What can I do? How often the boisterous sea swallows up the mariner! Thousands of corpses lie where pearls lie deep. There is death-sorrow on the sea, which is echoed in the long wail of widows and orphans. The salt of the sea is in the eyes of many mothers and wives.

Remorseless billows, you have devoured the love of women, and the mainstay of households. What a resurrection will there be from the caverns of the deep when the sea gives up her dead!

Until then there will be sorrow on the sea. As if in sympathy with the woes of earth, the sea is forever fretting along a thousand shores, wailing with a sorrowful cry like her own birds, booming with a hollow crash of unrest, raving with uproarious discontent, chafing with hoarse wrath, or jangling with the voices of ten thousand murmuring pebbles.

The roar of the sea may be joyous to a rejoicing spirit, but to the son of sorrow the wide, wide ocean is even more forlorn than the wide, wide world. This is not our rest, and the restless billows tell us so. There is a land where there is no more sea—our faces are steadfastly set towards it; we are going to the place of which the Lord has spoken. Until then, we cast our sorrows on the Lord who trod the sea of old, and who makes a way for his people through its depths.