Beach Musings - Return

 

“If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?” - C.S. Lewis

“For this reason we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away from it.” Hebrews 2:1

Yesterday was a difficult day for me. Somewhere in the middle of a beach sport (football, soccer, Frisbee or kickball) I got injured. I think it’s a high ankle sprain like many pro athletes get so I feel like I’m in pretty good company…except for their paycheck and personal training staff, which are quite different from mine.
Thus endeth the comparison.

The injury limited my early AM beach walking (which I love) and my participation in more beach sports. However, that was not the difficult part…

I couldn’t hear the Father.

The fallout from a (hinted at in a prior post) extended family dinner time fiasco had injured my heart (more than I realized). Suffice to say, it was my own fault, I let it creep in, I drifted.

Here at the ocean in Hatteras, it’s easy to drift out to sea if you’re not paying attention. It happened to me the first time I came here with my wife Christine. I was catching waves and got caught in a rip current that carried me far from the shore. When I realized how faraway I was (surfers were in front of me, usually not a good sign) I started swimming in. Meanwhile my wife was on the beach wondering if she was going to become a young widow watching me disappear into the horizon. Here’s the problem…if you swim INTO a rip current your will never make it back to shore; it will continue to pull you out no matter how strong of a swimmer you are (unless you’re Aquaman). You have to swim parallel to the shoreline until you swim out of the current, then you’ll able to swim in. Or in my case, wash up like a skinny beached whale.

My ankle and shoulder are hurting (yep, same beach sport) but I think my heart is on the mend. I needed to swim out of the current of self-pity and ride the waves of His love…returning safely to shore. You don’t need an ocean to drift; choices can do that just as easily. Instead of believing the worse, I needed to believe things that I have heard the Father say about me. Those words help me return to the shore and not in
a washed-up fashion.

Return is a good word.

Blessings,
Jay

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