I love the smell, sound and sight of the ocean. So vast and uncontrollable. Beautiful, ever-changing, chaotic, mysterious. The ocean fills me with deep yearning.

In the beginning, says Genesis 1:1-2, the earth was dark and formless, and “a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”

I have a photo of myself taken when I was four, probably on the Santa Monica beach. My dad had been called up to fight, and was training at Camp Hahn in Santa Monica, an Army installation that no longer exists. In the picture I am standing transfixed in shallow, lapping waves, staring out at the ocean.

I was so comfortable with water in those days that I’d lull myself to sleep each night by imagining myself floating on my back and gradually, head first, slipping into the dark water. By the time the water reached my face I was asleep. Praise the Lord, oh my soul. I slept well.

When I was in college I took a water ballet class. I’d grown up with movies starring Esther Williams — Million Dollar Mermaid — Jupiter’s Darling — and I was fascinated by water ballet.

I didn’t understand when I signed up that I’d have to perform in a water show, swimming the role of porpoises with two other young women.

Much of our routine was submerged. I’d never been good at holding my breath under water. I practiced and practiced, but I always had to breathe before the routine allowed me to surface.

I told my teacher about my asthma and how I felt I was suffocating during the routine. She refused to let me out of it. I descended into terror. I pictured myself holding my breath until I gulped in water and drowned.

I didn’t attend the performance. Instead I feigned illness and ran home to Mom.

In those days I didn’t know to call on God, whose Spirit moves ceaselessly over the deep. I didn’t understand that prayer and praising the Lord were acts of buoyancy that would lift me up and strengthen me to face my fears — even to the point of demanding that my teacher listen to me.

Instead I blamed myself, and never the teacher who, if she knew ways to improve my breathing, didn’t show them to me.

The teacher gave me a “C” for the water ballet class. I was a senior and I passed. That was good. And I never tried water ballet again.

To this day, though, I’m often overcome with an intense longing to visit the ocean. I love squiggling my bare toes in the sand, feeling the thin, cold waves wash over my feet, with the salt smell of the sea in my nose.

“Yonder is the sea, great and wide,” says Psalm 104:25-28, “[living] things innumerable are there…. When you open your hand, they are filled with good things…. Bless the LORD, O my soul. Praise the LORD!”

The ocean calls. And oh, I long to go.

Joan Uda is a retired United Methodist minister who lives in Helena. Her email is joanuda@yahoo.com