It is a day when sanity is restored and reason is reinstated after a twenty-four hour period of madness.
There are no sales. No deadlines. No hoopla.
Each year, our family drives six hours south to spend Thanksgiving at the beach with Katherine’s parents, and there is usually no question about what we will do with our extra time on lazy-days. We kick off our shoes, pack up the car, and head down to the ocean. Today, under the banner of a warm Indian summer sun, we made the short trek east across the inter-coastal waterway to greet the fall surf.
It was a good day for a walk.
Matthew, with his blue corduroys rolled up to his knees, ran uninhibited toward the receding tide with secret plans of hosting a one-man diving excursion while mom and dad weren’t looking. Kendall opted for quieter diversions, and split off to collect sea shells. After walking along the cool salt water with Katherine and Matthew for awhile, I decided to join Kendall on her search for the perfect conch.
“I don’t like collecting shells,” she mumbled as we walked along.
I was a little surprised by her statement, and asked her what had soured her on the prospect.
“I have to carry the cup,” she complained, glancing down at the plastic cup she was carrying as a temporary holding bin for her shells.
I couldn’t help but laugh.
Earlier, Kendall had done her best to push the responsibility of tending to the cup off on me. After absorbing the "no" she surely knew was coming, she went to work on Katherine, and finally, having no success, tried to connive her unsuspecting younger brother into taking over her cup duty so that she could walk along the beach unhindered. Charity was sparser than usual, and despite her best efforts, she was stuck with the cup.
We continued to walk and look for shells.
After awhile, I looked into the plastic cup and noticed that Kendall had collected some halfway-decent looking specimens.
Mingling with the unblemished shells were a few broken-off, faded out fragments that I couldn’t quite figure out.
“What’s with the broken shells?” I asked. “You’re only supposed to collect the ones that are whole.”
Kendall looked at the shells in question, temporarily forgot her ire about having to carry the cup, and made a case for keeping the fragments.
“Well...they're still pretty,” she said.
I shrugged and continued to walk. Meanwhile, Matthew had found water pooling in a large, shallow crater in the sand. The sun warmed the 6 -inch deep water to a pleasant balminess, enticing Matthew to take the plunge and go for full-body immersion.
“You missed a spot,” I yelled, noticing a small area on his shirt that was untouched by the water and wet sand.
Matthew looked up and continued his splashing, blissfully unaware and completely unconcerned with his sopping wet clothes and diaper.
I shook my head at his antics.
“Ignorance is bliss,” I thought to myself as I reflected on his generally care-free attitude toward life.
Later, as we walked back toward the car, I was struck with the simple wisdom that both of my children had unknowingly contributed to our afternoon walk.
Kendall, who had spent the afternoon mingling broken shells with those that were whole, was convinced that all of them were beautiful regardless of their condition.
Her choice of keepsakes brought to mind a verse from the New Testament:
“They that are whole have no need of the physician,” Jesus said, “but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.
Jesus later reminded us that our heavenly Father is well-invested in the business of restoring things that are broken.
“I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.”
As Jeffery R. Holland once said, God seems to take special note of “broken things to mend"; especially those that have been left lying helpless and stranded on the beaches of His creation. To be sure, if the Savior had been walking with Kendall today, He would have smiled when He looked inside of her plastic cup.
“They’re still pretty,” she said simply.
Well said.
Matthew on the other hand, fell headlong into the ocean and then plowed like a bull through ankle-deep water before we could get our hands on him to stop him. Blissfully unaware of the rules of civility and how things “should be,” he didn’t quite understand why his antics led to our walk on the ocean being terminated.
Soaked and covered with sand, he was quite ready to continue the festivities for as long as he was able.
Kind of reminds me of our own relationship with a perfect, all-knowing God.
Despite our best efforts, our feeble claims to personal righteousness (at least while being impaired by pride and self-will) are compared to “filthy rags” when illuminated by the perfect holiness of a just God. More often than we probably think, we go blundering through life, soaked and sandy, with no inkling that we have fallen into deep water and need to be dried off.
Yet God is merciful to us in our fallen condition.
He does not demand perfection of us....at least not all at once.
C.S. Lewis said:
“ No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep on picking ourselves up each time. We shall of course be very muddy and tattered children by the time we reach home. But the bathrooms are all ready, the towels put out, and the clean clothes in the airing cupboard. The only fatal thing is to lose one’s temper and give it up.”
After watching Matthew’s quick recovery from his mischief and his willingness to walk toward the car with a cheerful attitude, I expect good things will yet come to him. He is young and will learn quickly enough about “how things are.”
For the time being, Katherine and I contented ourselves with changing Matthew’s bloated diaper, stripping off his soaked clothes, and thanking God for the extra dose of Indian summer.
As I pulled out of the parking lot and watched the Atlantic ocean fade in my rear-view mirror, I remembered an old story about a man who had an incredible encounter one night while walking on the ocean.
“One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord, (and)
many scenes from my life flashed across the sky," begins the account.
If you’ve ever taken a walk on the beach and looked for a certain set of “Footprints”, the rest of that story will be as familiar as the salty ocean breeze.
If you've never heard of the legend, just go to any Christian bookstore and tell the clerk that you would like to know more about walking on the beach alone with the Lord.
They'll know exactly what you mean.
As for me, a good stroll along the ocean always seems to clear the air, no matter what's going on in the world. There is a familiarity in the hiss of the pounding surf that is timeless. I guess no matter how many people we invite to walk with us on the sands of our lives, there is always one more set of footprints left in the shifting dunes than we thought would be there. Coming off of a Black Friday that was tainted with reports of robbery, greed, and violence, I was grateful for a well-timed reminder that life is still pretty simple if we leave our footprints in the right place....with the right people.
Whether we are being carried along the shoreline in the depths of our weakness or are walking along at a steady pace of our own design, we will all eventually come to the knowledge that there is no beach so far or ocean so remote that our footprints will go unnoticed by Him who created them. And if we are listening to the still small voice that travels along the current of the ocean breeze, we will also come to realize that regardless of whether we are broken, whole, or in-between, we are all "still pretty" in the eyes of the Master shell collector.
