A Short Beach Sermon

January 28, 2015 By Kelle

If you’ll turn in your Bibles with me please to the second chapter of Beach and read with me starting with the first verse.

The beach is where I dump my feels. The gulf is forgiving and accepting and hungry for feelings, so it waits for me and I come–watching the kids chase seagulls and sandpipers and search for shells, but feeding my feelings to the tide while I do. On really feely weeks, there’s so much to pour out that I need to open my arms wide, pull my head back, close my eyes and slowly breathe in the salty air, exhaling love–the achy kind that sometimes mutates into fear and anxiety. Sometimes I imagine this process Harry Potter style, and I picture pulling my feelings out in long glowing strands and dropping them into the gulf pensieve where they swirl around and dissolve. Sometimes there’s nothing to breathe out but peace and gratitude, and on those days the gulf generously throws them back to me, like a boomerang.

On the beach, I am small.

In biology–my college major (I mean one of my *cough*triple minors*cough*)–I remember learning about why cells are so small, an important element in the surface-area-to-mass-ratio that allows them to survive. Cells must constantly react with their surrounding environment to stay alive, and the most productive, strong survivor cells are the small ones but with the greatest surface area–the ones with the big feelers that project out into the world to soak it up.

All that feely stuff isn’t just a bunch of wayward emotions or fluff. It’s science. Be a feely survivor cell. Stay small but stretch your feelings out as far as they can go to soak up as much of the world as you can.

Other life lessons you can find at the beach:

Play. Don’t be so serious.

(His name is Heck, by the way.)