RemembeRED: Benediction

Note: This week, we want you to write about sand. Yes...sand.

It doesn't have to be summer-related, but the impending summer and my proximity to Lake Michigan and it's glorious beaches are what inspired me to tell you to write about sand.

So.

SAND.

GO.

Oh, and come back Tuesday, May 10 and link up.

SAND.


It was my first overnight trip without my parents. I was almost eighteen, and three of my friends and I had packed up the car and driven to Ocean City. We dropped off our stuff at our cramped hotel room, changed into swimsuits, and hit the sand for four days of summer fun. The sun was high in the sky at that point; the group of us never could manage to leave for anywhere on time. But it didn't matter, because we were at the beach! On our own!!!! Squeeeeeee!!!!! I remember that we had a wonderful time. We sunned, we walked the boardwalk, we flirted with cute boys, and were just girls for the last moments before we all went off to college.

Yet I have never been a person who enjoys moving among the crowds of people and music and noise that is the summertime at the beach. My senses quickly became overwhelmed trying to keep up. So I woke up early on the second day, quietly dressed in some shorts and a t-shirt, left a note for my friends, and walked the two blocks to the beach while it was still dark.

At that time of the day, there wasn't yet another soul out here: it was just me, the sand, and the implacable vastness of the ocean meeting the stars...it felt sacred.

As I first stepped onto the beach that morning, the sand felt as cool as water as my feet melded into it. The sand was fluid, sliding over my feet and slippery between my toes. I walked toward the ocean, just to the edge of where the waves carried the water up onto the beach. I took one step more, hesitant, and the tide of water rushed over the top of my feet, carrying the sand that I was standing on away from me. It was as though I was sinking into the ground, my feet yearning to be rooted here, a tree to bear witness to my insignificance. I felt uplifted by the moment; uplifted, and sanctified. I watched the sun rise up above the water, and then I walked back to the hotel room, marveling at what I had seen.

My friends were still sleeping when I crept back into the room. I locked the door and lay down on a bed. As I drifted off, I tried to hold onto the emotions, that blessing, that I had experienced out on that beach, but they flowed away from me like the cool sand had slipped between my toes.