Building sandcastles
Melanie - June 8, 2010
Sophie mentioned yesterday that we're at the beach right now with our kids. We have had the best time even though I'm still feeling a little motion sickness from the waves even as I sit here in a nice comfy chair.
After approximately too many hours in the ocean yesterday afternoon, I managed to convince my daughter, Caroline, that we needed to build a sand castle. Thankfully, she agreed and we began to fill buckets with sand and dump them over to make various structures. We molded big piles of sand together with the intent of making a masterpiece.
Have you ever seen those pictures from sandcastle-building contests? The ones where people somehow manage to make these elaborate works of art using only sand and a plastic shovel?
Yeah. Ours looked nothing like that.
But every time I start to build a sandcastle, I have high hopes that this might be the time that I pack the sand just right and make the perfect moat and create turrets that actually stay instead of crumbling to the ground.
In other words, I'm admitting that I have an inner sandcastle-building geek just dying to get out.
And my sandcastles never turn out that great, mainly because I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm just putting sand in buckets and hoping for the best.
As we built our sandcastle yesterday, it was far from the vision I had in my mind. It crumbled in one spot, our moat wouldn't hold water, the turrets were just beyond my capabilities. But Caroline began to cover our creation with shells we'd found earlier and we sat back and admired our creation. It was far from perfect, but it was beautiful because it was ours and we'd worked on it together.
It's not unlike what God does with our lives. We have this vision, this image of perfection, that we think would be the ideal scenario. The best job, the ideal husband, the right education for our kids. And those things don't always work out they way we planned.
They get knocked over, they fall apart, and they turn out lopsided. But through it all God is there working all things together. He carves and He sculpts and He makes something beautiful as we walk with Him. And, in the end, it may be far from our original version of perfect. It will be better because we made it with Him.
Many are the plans in a man's heart, but it is the LORD's purpose that prevails. Proverbs 19:21
Melanie
Melanie
Sophie
Sophie
Paige
Paige
Kris
Kris
Comments (1)
Melanie, you’re exactly right, and as I look back from about 12 years ahead of you on this walk ‘o life, I can tell you that the castle I dreamed of and the path to inhabit it could not be more different than I had envisioned. The painful times were much worse; the joy was much more poignant; and God was more faithful, more gentle, more gracious, more patient, more generous, and more real than I ever could have dreamt.
Posted on June 8, 2010 11:19 AM