God has made everything beautiful in its time. God has also set eternity in the human heart;
Ecclesiastes 3:11
Ok, so this lead photograph is from the archives. But it made me smile so I am going to have to share.
I ran across the beach image looking back through my posts over the past 15 years. The reason I’m going back over old posts is researching material for my new book. Once in a while I find something that is perfect for the new project. Also once in a while I find a photograph that grabs my interest and makes me smile.
This was my first trip to California and my first Pacific Ocean beach. In all my travels around the USA – making it as far west as Montana, Idaho and Wyoming in the fall of 1975, then driving through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado in 1997 – I never made it to the Pacific Coast until the epic road trip Rebekah and I took in 2006.
We motored from Seattle, through Oregon and into Northern California. We saw spectacular mountains, explored the Columbia River Gorge, climbed up and well beyond the top of 620-foot Multnomah Falls and hiked amongst giant Redwood and Sequoia trees. But it was lighthouse hunting along the Pacific Coast that most captured my imagination.
The beach photo was taken, I believe, not too far from Eureka, where Rebekah and I had stopped in to find a Presbyterian Church for Sunday worship. I remember they were excited to have us there and the ushers gave us both visitor gift bags that included a nice mug along with church information and some local candy.
Then, after worship, when they discovered we were just on vacation and not looking for a church home, the lady in charge of “welcome” tried to take back the gifts!
The Pacific Ocean grabbed at my heart and kept it as we drove back north, following the California coast and then on into Oregon, finding lighthouses along the way. And I felt the West Coast beginning to get under my skin.
I have been back twice. Once when Rebekah was speaking at a conference in the San Francisco Bay area, then again when I was invited to lead a retreat in San Diego.
Liminal Space and Spiritual Life:
I am not really a seafaring person, but there is something about that liminal space where the oceans wash up against the land, like those thin places where time and eternity share space, the fuzzy edges of known and unknown – and I am drawn into the mystery and the fluidity, the lapping of the waves and the hard to define edges of the shoreline.
It is not the uncertainty that attracts me so much as the overlapping, the sense of dipping my foot into eternity or another dimension – floating, untethered as it were, with the solid world just a few strokes away.
Rebekah and I have been talking a lot this week about spirituality, what it is and what it means. It occurs to me, thinking about floating in the ocean, submerged in and surrounded by water that is loaded with everything needed for life but yet we cannot drink or breathe, that spirituality is likewise something we can dip a toe into, splash around in, wade in, swim in and where we can even become – briefly – submerged, until we come out sputtering for the air we are used to and the water we can drink.
Yet we yearn for a deeper immersion, and one day an absorption into the eternal. Returning home in a sense into the sustaining completeness of God’s love.
These thoughts and metaphors and analogies are all based – of course – in the language and the experience of terra firma. The promise and purposes of God are hard to describe considering both the expanse of time-space and the transcendence of the Creator. Yet spirituality helps us to find our home both now and in the eternal.
We are heading to one of our favorite “thin places” next week. I will report back on what I learn – DEREK
