On Saturday and Sunday mornings I love getting up early to watch the sun rise. I walk a half mile to a point I consider one of the best places to watch. No buildings or traffic, just open land. On my walk to the point I can start to feel the warmth on my back and see a twinge of light sneaking into the corners of my sunshades. It brings a huge smile to my face because it feels like the sun is just waking up and embracing me from behind. As I continue to walk to the point, that twinge gets a little more brighter and brighter. It’s enticing. I feel like the sun is cooking up a surprise and I can’t seem to wait any longer before I turn around and see the light show. As soon as I get to my point, I turn and see the magnificence. My face lights up. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen… Morning after morning its a new scene from the same point and is always a surprise. Sometimes I’m tempted to paint it, but it would be an injustice to what my eyes can capture. I think i prefer to keep it in my mind where it can remain that special souvenior God has given me here in Florida.

I did not love him, God knows, because I was some sort of saint or hero. I did not love him because I suddenly saw the light or because I hoped by loving him would persuade him to fix my life. I loved him because I couldn’t help myself. I loved him because the one who commands us to love is the one who also empowers us to love, as there in the wilderness of that dark and terrible time i was in, through no doing of my own, empowered to love him at least a little, at least enough to survive.

So much happens to us over the years, within us, through us, it’s important to take time to remember on purpose. It means not picking up a book or turning on the radio, but letting the mind journey gravely, deliberately, back through the years that have gone by but are not gone. It means a deeper, slower kind of remembering; it means remembering as a searching and finding. And then, we will find, beyond any feelings of joy or regret that one by one the memories give rise to, a profound and undergirding peace, a sense that in some unfathomable way all is well. We have survived, you and I. Maybe that is at the heart of remembering. We have made it to this year, this day. We needn’t have made it. There were times we never thought we would and nearly didn’t. There were times we almost hoped we wouldn’t, were ready to give the whole thing up. Each must speak for himself, for herself, but I say for myself that I have seen sorrow and pain enough to turn the heart to stone. Who hasn’t? Many times I have chosen the wrong road, or the right road for the wrong reason. Many times I have loved the people I love too much for either their good or mine, and others I might have loved I have missed loving and lost. I have followed too much the desires of my own heart, yet often when my heart called out to me to be brave, to be kind, to be honest, I have not followed at all. Weak as we are, a strength beyond our strength has pulled us through at least this far, at least to this day. Foolish as we are, a wisdom beyond our wisdom has flickered up just often enough to light us if not to the right path through the forest, at least to a path that leads us forward, that is bearable. Faint of heart as we are, a love beyond our power to love has kept our hearts alive. * adapted

I remember reading fitness magazines in high school and thinking ‘wow, to be able to walk outside anytime of the year and go for a run on the beach, that would be the life’! Funny how your mind can come up with a great imagination of how things would be if….

Years later, I am now a Sunshine state resident. I live less than 20 minutes from the beach and have plenty of spare weekends. All the resources one would need to ‘walk outside and run on the beach’, but ask me how many times this has actually happened in the last three years and I would recommend you just dream as I once did.