“After a visit to the beach, it’s hard to believe that we live in a material world.”

Pam Shaw

Here we are, not just in Pensacola but out at Pensacola Beach. We pulled in mid-afternoon Saturday, having made our way through an “I can’t see to drive” thunderstorm in the city.

Good grief, talk about an amazing location! My writing desk for the week looks out through the veranda to the jetty and across the Santa Rosa Sound.

A Special History for our family:

This place has a special history for us from when – several times in the late 80’s and early 90’s – our friends Butch and Norma Crooke extended a generous invitation for us to stay out here for family vacations.

Back then it was a simple cinderblock two bedroom with terrazzo floors and an amazing screened porch as big as the house, with a Boston whaler tied up at the dock. It was perfect for our family.

I remember Andrew, maybe ten years old, climbing into the hammock on the porch, carefully balancing a glass of lemonade. He looked around, smiling. “Ahhh,” he said with a satisfied sigh. “This is the life.”

The perfect retreat:

As you can see, the original cinderblock house is gone and Rebekah and I are enjoying Norma’s expansive, comfortable beach home with endless windows, endless views, an enormous veranda, its own dock and a built-in invitation to rest and to be at peace.

This morning we plan to eat breakfast looking out over the water, take a short walk on the beach, and then drive over to Trinity Presbyterian Church in Cordova Park for Sunday morning worship.

Trinity is where Rebekah served as associate pastor from 1982-1996, and if you were to look at the story of our lives then this amazing church, full with beautiful people who lived such a powerful and eloquent witness to faith in action, helped to set our ministry trajectory – and that course was true.

Stay tuned for more as this week unfolds. If ever there were two people who could say that our lives have been a catalogue of one rich blessing after another, then it would be Rebekah and me. We really could not make this stuff up it is so beautiful, so true and so very good.

In love and because love has been our guide – DEREK