I think it’s ironically appropriate that I’m featuring Florida beach pictures the day I wake up to walk the dog and discover it is 9-degrees outside.

I guess we really don’t live in Brandon any more!

Some of you – particularly my friends who live in the Midwest – may not be that impressed with a number without a minus sign in front; but nine Fahrenheit translates into -12 on the Celsius scale, thank you very much. Plus you have to remember that I lived in Florida for 35 of the past 37 years, and my basis for comparison is seriously influenced by the Sunshine State.

NEW YEAR IN THE SUN: Part of our post-Christmas trip involved visiting my folks in Sarasota. That’s when we spent a couple of serendipitous hours out at Bradenton Beach.

There’s something about the meeting point of land and water that  reminds me of the shoreline where the spiritual world laps at the edges of the temporal sphere, where eternity washes up against time, where the sacred interfaces with the profane, where two worlds meet and where the one sometimes washes over the other, where the border is often indistinct, and where it is possible almost to reach out and touch what is unreachable and untouchable.

When I stand at the edge of the ocean I feel as if I could shed all the bulky trappings of temporal life, leave them in a pile on the sand, take a few steps out, arch my back, and literally plunge into God, only coming up for air because this is where I live, and because I am as much a creature of creation as I am fashioned in the image of the Creator.

So I look at these photographs, and I smile because the nearness of God does allow me to plunge in, and the beauty of this good Earth serves to remind me that God has plunged into this world in Jesus, and that I can have the best of both worlds because eternity is now, and the journey into God began the day I chose to take Jesus as my guide.

Enjoy the photographs (below), and – in a spiritual sense – dive in. – DEREK