Sitting on the beach, my toes buried in the warm sand, soft breeze cooling my already burning skin, my Dutch/German/Irish heritage ensured a decided lack of tan. Instead I burned by finite degrees regardless of the SPF promised by Coppertone. I was too enshrined by saline scented bliss to care about my reddening skin. The beach was (is) my happy place – Atlantic Ocean stretched out before me, deepening from shades of soft moss green to deepest grey where it met an azure horizon, waves breaking on the shell-littered sand, kites flying overhead, children laughing. My book lay abandoned beside my chair. There was no way the sinking of the Lusitania could hold my attention when so much joy surrounded me. (I may have a slight ADD issue.)
Every deep breath I inhaled brought renewal, carried peace – something I’d been missing for so many long months. I knew where I was headed now, where I belonged. When God delivers He does it in huge ways, and this time had been no different. So, as I sat on the beach I whispered words of thanksgiving not just that I was at my happy place but also that I had been given answers. Then I settled in to relax and enjoy every second of a glorious day.
Two hours later, I roused from my sun-induced daze and watched with increasing interest as a man with a bucket and fishing pole strolled into my oceanfront view, stopping about 10 feet in front of me. He looked left and right as if trying to decide if he truly wanted to set-up shop at that particular spot. Apparently, that was the place because he dropped his bucket and reached down into its depths retrieving a small, whole fish. I watched in stunned and slightly appalled disbelief as the man baited the hook at the end of his line with the little fish and cast far out into the waves.
Now, my opposition to the fisherman arose not out of his sport. My concern stemmed from the slight problem that whatever that whole fish attracted was going to be much bigger than itself, say a shark, and the fisherman was casting into waters populated by swimming children. See the problem? However, I also knew that each and every day sharks swam among the mostly (deliberately) ignorant bathers at the beach, even in the shallowest of waters. After all, it was the shark’s natural habitat, and we were the interlopers. I just did’t want the reminder while I was actually at the beach.
But as I was sitting on the beach contemplating the fisherman and his potential catch, I started thinking about how sharks in the shallows aren’t so different from our every day lives. We know the bumps and bruises and potential hazards and tragedies are out there; we just ignore them, go about our every day lives deliberately pretending that those things that could harm us aren’t weaving in and out of our day. Occasionally, we get bitten or someone we care about gets bitten by life, and we shy away from the spaces that those hazards perpetually inhabit until our hearts heal. Then we return, a bit more wary perhaps, but we return all the same.
Returning to those places isn’t on our own strength; it can’t possibly be. There has to be something bigger than ourselves that provides the balm to heal the ragged, injured place, sets us straight again, loves us enough to convince us that going back to the site of damage, while scary or terrifying even, isn’t going to destroy us. That “something bigger” is God – omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and just as He created us, He created the literal sharks and sanctioned the figurative ones. There’s nothing we go through in this life He hasn’t already approved, already said that by His strength we will survive. We never walk alone. Sometimes I forget this; sometimes I need a reminder like a fisherman standing directly in front of me baiting his hook with a whole fish.
In case you were wondering about my fisherman friend, my concern didn’t take long to be realized. Within moments the fishing rod bent low with the tug of something struggling on the hook. When he reeled in the line the catch proved, indeed, to be a very small shark, and, well, that was the end of my beach day.
The Unexpected Life 