Blogging the Beach: Installment 2, Tuesday
The weather was a bit more cooperative for us today, with the sun making its debut around noon and remaining more or less congenial to us for the remainder of the day. The water is passably warm, which means that one’s lips don’t turn a full shade of blue until 30 minutes or so, which I wasn’t about to test. I did jump in for a couple of 10-15 minute stretches, actually, and I’m exaggerating a bit, because the water wasn’t really that bad, it’s just that with the waves barely qualifying as waves, well, there just wasn’t that awful much to do out there, so I retreated to my chair on the beach and ended up, on the entire day, reading about half of Jim Collins’ Good to Great.
Later in the day, we made our annual pilgrimage to Cape Hatteras—and when I say that we went to Cape Hatteras, what I mean is that we went all the way out to the very tip, the very point, of land, where northbound waves collide with westbound ones in cataclysms of ocean spray, and where roughly 4000 people per day think that the fishing is great (again, a bit of an overstatement, but the 4-wheel-drives were semi-wall-to-wall at the very tip itself. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t really a whole lot of actual fish-catching going on, but “a bad day fishing…”, you know…
The kids enjoyed jumping around in the shallows that existed today; every time we go out to the point, the shape is completely different from the time before. Today, there were a couple of sandbars that could be easily reached by the smallest of kids; here’s Levi and Wonderful Daughter frolicking (note that Levi, Chip and Erin’s energetic five-year-old, has both feet off the ground). Shells were gathered; birds were chased; the remains of a toothed fish (barracuda?) were perused, found washed up on the sandbar with flesh semi-eaten away by gulls.
At any rate, another great day enjoying a part of God’s creation that reminds us of His constancy; the waves I frolicked in today were washing up on these shores thousands of years prior to today, and if the Lord tarries, will be washing up on these shores long after my children’s grandchildren fade from this world’s memory. I rest in His unchanging grace…
This phrase comes from the 1978 "Jonestown massacre" in which most members of the Peoples Temple cult, blindly following their leader Jim Jones, committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.
Osborne: A Contrarian's Guide to Knowing God
Schlossberg: Idols For Destruction
