At the Water’s Edge
Here I am again, back at what feels like the starting place of so many parts of my life, wondering if this really is a track I’m racing around—an endless loop rather than the vast trail into the unknown I thought I was taking.
With predictable rhythm, I find myself stuck on a metaphor in need of reframing. Who knows what the cause of my melancholy is this week, but it’s strong and persistent.
I want to forge lasting things. But everywhere I look, I see my work consumed like sandcastles at a day’s end, pulled into the sea and leaving no imprint where they once were. Is the permanence I crave one of those foretaste things—a glimpse into the New Creation, and something I can’t or shouldn’t expect from a world whose greatest predictability is that, like a wicked toddler taking joy in destruction, something is going to come along to demolish beautiful things?
For whatever convergence of reasons, these days find me scouring the coastline for the things over which I have labored. Where are the structures I have formed with these hands? Meaning (outside of metaphor-land) where are the friendships, the art, the lasting impact I have made with the presence of my life in the world?
I guess there’s a kind of promise in the image of daily renewal. His “mercy is new every morning,” right? The guarantee of the sunrise signals a fresh start each day. But rather than refreshment, I have been feeling dread, wondering if the energy I expend—my life force breathed with determination into the world during my limited stint of mortality—is merely that: wind. Invisible. Fleeting. I feel like there is a kind of theology that demands the embracing of this futility. That implores surrender of human work to the work of the Divine and requires satisfaction to be found there.
I’m not going to dismiss this concept entirely, but I am certain there is more to it than that. We were made physical bodies in a physical world, with choice and tangible impact. It feels like the most natural of things, this longing to build something lasting that bears my mark as a unique being in this created world. We were, after all, not made identical cogs in a mechanized system. We were made infinitely variable—for what reason but that there’s intentional design to our distinctiveness and what it adds to the world?
I return to the water's edge in my mind. Where’s the truth to be gleaned here? Let the ocean take my efforts into its arms and distribute those grains where it will. Perhaps my work is not ultimately the sandcastles but the coastline. Perhaps what I have done is and will be enough to shape something beautiful. Perhaps this thing that’s being built is not only from my grains of sand but it’s a communal work made alongside my human brothers and sisters, made alongside God. Maybe it’s all true. Or none of it.
I’m struggling to reframe this metaphor. All I know is that I can’t stagnate on this idea that my hands are shaping only impermanent things that will inevitably disappear—sometimes even before they are finished. I have to believe that there’s a real live breathing touchable thing that I’m creating in this world, and that it can’t be destroyed.
Return, Laura. Remember: you are “where God happens.” Your body. Your life. Within. It's ultimately your story that is the permanent thing: it is fixed and forming at the same time. I, myself, am the Work, and as an eternal being, I cannot be destroyed. There's both relief and grief in that thought, isn’t there? People often long to change their story, or part of it. We can rethink but not reshape the past. We have power and agency and also limits. Balance. It’s such a mystery, containing all sorts of contradictions. Balance is where surrender of our work meets tangible value of our work and both are true. I believe we have a benevolent Balance-Maker. I must believe it. It’s essential to my survival.
I have no conclusion to offer, I’m afraid. I’m chasing a thread and I don’t think I’ve reached the end yet. This is merely the current wrestling match of my mind on display. I am working through it. My mind and heart are locked into the fight. What will remain when the dust of combat settles? Well, I suppose My Self.
