Faith
sees the invisible, believes the incredible and receives the impossible.
- Anonymous
One summer children were digging in the sand on a nearby beach and
uncovered the head of a whale. First they exposed the tip of a smooth white
bone that turned out to be part of its skeleton. Everyone thought the whale probably
washed ashore during one of those mythic Cape Cod hurricanes, maybe forty years
before. Scientists came to do carbon testing. They determined the skeleton was at
least five hundred years old. The entire head weighed four hundred pounds! Sand,
blown by the wind over centuries, covered – and then uncovered - this leviathan
that for generations was waiting to be revealed.
Pain is the constant chaperone of living. Everyone I know has it: back
pain, shoulder pain, hip pain, arthritis pain, headaches, heartaches and loss.
We cannot always change this but there are ways to live with courage. Get the hang
of being still; stillness that does not depend on what happens. Let a new wind
blow in without knocking us over.
Spend time on any beach. Shifting sands are real. The beach where I
live in the summer has gone from being covered with sand to being covered with rocks
and is now morphing again to sand. We are that beach. Who knows what will be
revealed over time that for the moment is hidden? It could be a whale of a
thing!
