Waves And Light And Peace

Up at 6am, out of the house by 6:30am, I drove two hours for church yesterday morning. I spoke for 10 minutes during the early service and sang, “We’ve Got Miles To Go.” I went to Sunday school and thought about purpose and vision. I did the children’s sermon during the 11:00 service and sang “A Follower’s Prayer.” I heard the same sermon twice—a sermon about Isaac and his humanity and God’s faithfulness. I drove two hours home, stopping to fill GiGi The White Ant with gas and Harry My Belly with food. I packed GiGi’s trunk and back seat, lay down on the couch for ten minutes while reading with my ears, and then left home again to pick up Cindy so that we could go to staff retreat.

We stopped by our offices to get planning materials, road down a long road for a long time, had serious and silly conversations, got coffee at Starbucks, and ate supper at Shoneys. We arrived at our hotel around 7:30pm. We overloaded the luggage cart, found our room, unloaded our luggage cart, returned our luggage cart, moved GiGi to a legal parking place, and then sat with Donna, Laurie, and Sandra for a little while before going to walk on the beach.

We walked for a little over an hour. We walked toward the bright lights of the Myrtle Beach Skywheel as if they were a beacon guiding us safely through a dark night. We stopped under the wheel, marveled at its height, and then walked away from it until another night. We came back to the room, got ready for bed, and then I finished the 20th hour of the book that I had been reading since Thursday. I started a 27-hour book today.

Today, too, we’ve talked and thought and worked and planned and in a few moments I will leave the tranquility of the porch on which I'm writing to go inside and cook dinner.

There’s something to the consistency of the waves. There’s something to their movement, to their ebbing and flowing and constant change.

And there was something to the brightness of the lights against last night’s dark sky. There was something beautiful and compelling that made me want to be with the light.

And I think there’s something to Jesus, too. I think there’s something to the ever opening presence of his life and words and something to the light of love that belief offers. There’s something to the peace that he offers in the midst of speaking and sitting and listening and reading and questioning and traveling and eating and drinking. There’s something to the beauty of creation that he, the Word, created—that he, the Word, is creating—and right now, in this moment, as rain begins to fall, I confess that I am humbly overwhelmed by this something of waves and light and peace.