Noon on Sunday comes fast when church starts at 4pm and you sleep in. I trade pajama pants for shorts to walk on the beach before showering. It’s Junuary in the seaside village I call home: Blue skies, chirping birds, pelicans hovering low in single file and a gull floating like the sea is his raft and the hands of God rocking.

I know this is a rare gift, like snow falling in summer.

I’m mesmerized by the beauty of this endless horizon; stutter to a halt on the weathered walkway leading back to my car.  Linger for one final look.

Like a father pushing his hand into a child’s back to lead her, He nudges me to keep walking.

So I do.

With a camera strapped over my shoulder I continue, crouch down to photograph a message sticked in the wet sand. As I frame the shot, I feel Him say, “This is why I wanted you to keep walking, what I wanted you to see. It’s my message to you.”

Breathless for a minute on a vacant expanse of beach, I watch waves crest, stretch frothy fingers toward my toes and curl back into the sand leaving scattered shells of perspective.

Fulfillment is finding your sweet spot. That platform where you soar high above the crowds with an endless horizon of possibility because you know a God that loves you like this.

A pelican expands his wings, glides above the water at eye level, tipping his elongated beak down toward the water, and hesitates like a woman changing her mind in the mirror.

If God allowed that pelican to catch every single fish he dove after without failing, he would be too fat to fly. Grounded by an insatiable appetite.

We’re not meant to catch every fish, or the eye of every reader, or the heart of every man. Just those he gives us. And that is enough.

I kick the sand off my shoes, turn the key in the ignition and these words from a Kelly Clarkson song on the radio become my prayer when I hear them: “You’re teaching me to see beauty in everything.”

“Yes, you are, aren’t you?”

“You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of your hands; they will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment, like a robe you will roll them up, like a garment they will be changed. But you are the same, and your years will have no end.”(Hebrews 1:10-12 ESV)

Linking with Emily Wierenga at Imperfect Prose with the prompt: Encourage. Because this walk embodies the word for me.