Pebble on a Beach

     Even now, months later, my memories of sitting on the beach in Ft. Walton, Florida have a way of enchanting me, calming me. You see, I have been thinking a lot about moments.

     What is it about that particular stretch of clean, crisp, white beach that beckons to my soul, even now? There is something soothing in it, healing, necessary, and soul-achingly honest about that particular environment, that particular moment. 

     For a long while, the moment was wrapped up in tear-filled anticipation, like an unopened gift. I envisioned it, hoped for it, planned on it, hungrily and desperately.

     Then, finally, the moment was revealed in all its tender glory. There it was in its fluid fragility. The moment did not remain, did not slow. The moment did not wait for me to wrap my mind around it. The moment slipped on in that subtle and delicate way that moments tend to do. The moment was not mine to command, but rather was a gift. It was a gift from the sea, and more so from its Creator. 

     And now and forevermore the moment will be tucked neatly in my memory, shimmering and again fragile, sometimes crisp and sometimes as through a darkened glass. 

     Memories are made sacred by our processing of them, relating to them, remembering them again and again. This particular memory- this impression of being there on the beach which had beckoned to my spirit for sometime- brings with it waves of refreshment. It is, more than its accurate self, blossomed into a deeper and more honest self: an impression of stillness, an impression of letting God be Creator, an impression of rest and wonder and glory. 

     I find that I am most my child-self when sitting as a pebble on a long stretch of beach with whose creation I've had nothing to do. I have had no hand in the sculpting of the ocean in its vastness, its power and the respect it demands with each crashing wave upon the shore. I cannot command it. I cannot even begin to understand it. I can study it, glory in it, admire it, fear it. But I? I am just the pebble, a fellow creation who has been gifted with a moment. This gift is a passing, transient, but powerful, moment that continues to shape and cleanse and refresh with each new wave of the remembering. 

     I remember. I savor. I reconcile myself with the majesty of my Creator. I bask. I am still. Meanwhile the beach is still there, sovereign of my thinking, unconscious of my feelings. My Creator God continues to act, to speak, to breathe His will into being, and it is in this powerful knowledge that I find my deepest sense of rest, not merely in my memories, but in the present, here and now, and looking toward an inscrutable future.