Peace Like an Ocean

Peace Like an Ocean

My husband got sun-poisoned at the beach, but I didn’t know it until the next morning when he helped me cart our three girls and various and sundry items back across the blinding white sand. His head throbbed so badly, he thought he might be sick. I sent him back to bed in the condo, where he would remain for the next twenty-four hours.

Four years ago, traveling back to Wisconsin on Christmas Eve, his head throbbed so badly he stayed in the hotel room with our baby while I took our firstborn down to the hotel’s indoor pool. Three days later, he would have emergency brain surgery to relieve the pressure on his brain from a benign tumor, so you can imagine that our experience at Orange Beach conjured forth a little PTSD.

I stood in the waves with my third baby strapped to my chest and stared out over that cresting blue water. My six-year-old splashed along beside me. Farther up the beach, my now four-year-old dumped sand into the vestige of a castle. For an astounding part of the time, I have been able to forget that my husband is scheduled for surgery again. Call me naïve, but I am still contending for a miracle. Call my compartmentalization unhealthy, but I have also found that I have to kind of block off that January date on the calendar in order to be fully present in the day to day.

But in that moment, I felt heavy. I didn’t feel scared, exactly, just aware that I was at the beach with my three daughters while my husband lay on a strange bed with a pounding headache—just a migraine, with a fever and chills. But still, it brought it all back.

My six-year-old soon wanted to jump in the waves, so I waded out with her. I found the deeper I went, the easier it was, and that if I jumped with the waves rather than let them crash against me, those waves didn’t knock me down.

They actually served to propel me.

Once my two daughters and I moved back to the shore, I stood with my sandy shins burrowed in warm water and my baby salty and smiling against my chest and raised my arms up to the sky. It was part surrender, part prayer for my family’s life and our future. Part gratitude as well that the woman I was four years ago was not the same woman who was standing there now.

If Jesus knows the number of sand granules on the shore, he also knows the number meant to pass through the hourglasses of our lives. Nothing can change that. No diagnosis, no surgery, no fever, no threat.

Peace is found in the giver. In the one who breathed life into us. The one who called us into being.

Let’s go deeper, friends. Let’s jump with the waves of life so they propel us rather than knock us down.

How are you going to jump with the waves this week?

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Much love,

Jolina