On Sunday I felt pretty beat up and exhausted and I realized that I hadn’t seen the ocean in a really long time. I’ve stood by and floated down rivers, but I haven’t seen the OCEAN. I almost got in my car immediately but realized if I gave myself a sleep I could wake up and spend a whole day with the ocean.
A whole day near the ocean is exactly what I did on Monday. I pulled over to admire the beauty of the world when I felt the conviction to do so. When I got to Seaside I realized that while it had been sunny and tank top/shorts weather back in Portland, it was chilly at the beach and I’d overlooked packing a sweatshirt. So I immediately took to the shops. I thought it might be a bit masochistic to walk through stores knowing that all I could spend was the $5 my mom had given me, but I think I enjoyed everything in a new way. I admired clever signs, funny shirts and mugs, lots of seashells, and warm sweatshirts without seeing them as a tool to make me happy. They just were things and I simply looked at them.
I braved the cold in my shorts and t-shirt (I threw on a John Mayer t-shirt over my tank top, and it started quite a few conversations… who even knew!) and went to the ocean. Walking on the water’s edge was fine for awhile but then I started walking in, a few inches at a time. Before I knew it, I was in so deep that my shorts were soaked. I collected broken sand dollars, sang a few hymns, watched birds fly and eat crabs, and felt both painfully insignificant and overwhelmingly known at the same time.
After painfully walking back to my car with frozen toes and fingers, I began my slow journey home. A half an hour into the drive, I pulled over at Starbucks to finish reading Mere Christianity. Which is such a FANTASTIC book. I’m still recovering from it.
Before I dump a whole bunch of pictures on you, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from the book.
“In the long run GOD is no one but Himself and what He does is like nothing else.”
AMEN and amen.
ps I didn’t even spend my $5.
