by Loyd Rawls

Created on: May 12, 2009

There is something deeply embedded in our humanity that compels us to seek meaning in life. A crisis may command all our attention for a time, but then we may spend years asking the question: "Why me?" Good fortune dropped in our laps may compel us to somber reflection on why we were blessed and others, by contrast, seem to be cursed by life. People are born. People die.

Remove shoes. Roll up pants cuffs. Be careful of splinters as you tread the boardwalk over the dune and catch your first glimpse of the pre-dawn glow looking east across the expanse of the Atlantic. Stop a moment to capture a memory. Inhale fresh, salty air. Feel misty spray kicked up by the relentless surf. Seven pelicans are flying over the shallows in a formation that dips long enough to dive for fish who, themselves, are busy finding breakfast. The dim light is sufficient to reveal a small group of sanderlings tiptoeing in and out at the surf's edge pecking invisible bugs and darting away from the water's churning wall.

At the edge of sight, there is a classic vision of a man standing with a bent rod angled toward the spot where soon the sun shall emerge. He pits his hopes, skills and equipment against an ocean that feeds, shelters and protects its inhabitants.

Somewhere in that space at your back is a world where the urgencies of the moment trump the truly important issues of life. Phones ring. Lists order days. Obligations, quests, and duties are the traffic lights of daily existence.

To the front is the future. This is not the future of new toys, bigger cars, and fancy restaurants. This is the future of explorers, poets and scientists. These are the visions seen and rhythms heard by people for thousands of years. Through storms, plagues, holocausts and inquisitions, victims and oppressors alike have looked to the sea as a boundary and an escape.

Walk the beach, look, listen, and feel what others have experienced for so long. Begin to see problems in context of a burst of water that pounds, reforms, and pounds ceaselessly onto land and will continue until all future generations are released from this life.

Reflect on God, whose love and power, we say, is infinite. The ocean, which we can see expanding to the horizon and stretching, we know, far beyond our vision, can help our limited, receptive minds to know that human life is like a drop in His endless sea.

Poets can find endless metaphors in the way the ocean knocks on the door of our lives: embracing womb, merciless judge, providing father. Yet the greatest insights are those that surpass language. It is when we rest from our struggle to put the ocean into the confines of nouns, verbs, and adjectives that the ocean can speak to us in its own way. At this point, the real conversation with life can begin.

Learn more about this author, Loyd Rawls.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.