Time Never Stops

Yesterday, my family and I went to the Gold Coast.  Just south of Brisbane, the Gold Coast (an area, not a city) sits like a sandy jewel on the ring of Australia.  There are many beautiful things about the great southern land, but as I grew up in the middle of the United States, the closest thing we got to a beach was the hard sand shore of Lake Okoboji - about as much a beach as a Chihuahua is a guard dog.

As we drove down the busy stretch of highway, our excitement mounted; even though we live only two hours from the ocean, we visit relatively rarely.  I'm sure it's like those who live in St. Louis never see the Arch, or those that live in Phoenix never visit the Grand Canyon.  It's not that we don't want to, I think overcoming the energy it takes to produce the inertia to drive two hours overwhelms us sometimes.

Two hours.  That's it.

We were heading to the coast this weekend anyway to lead worship as Apostle 13, so Saturday we made a beeline for the beach.  After eating the prerequisite culinary cuisine of the beach - fish and chips - we noticed from our perch at the restaurant that the wind had picked up and the waves were pounding the shore.  We could hear the beat, the insistent thrumming, never ceasing under our feet, an echo of the ageless ocean.  With the tide as high as it was we decided to go the mouth of Currumbin Creek.  This stream flows directly into the ocean coursing through a channel of sand.  Where the creek meets the sea, there is a small sanctuary of non-waves.  Revelers can walk all the way across the river at low tide and swim across at high tide.  It is salty, endless salt and sand along the ocean, but the salt gives buoyancy.

We pulled our car to the end of the drive and to our great surprise, only a few people were parked there: mostly scantily clad twenty-somethings urging their endless push to skin cancer and a few even more scantily clad Europeans wearing teeeeeeeny tiny bikinis and the guys wear what Australians call 'Budgie Smugglers.'  A budgie is a kind of pet bird here in Australia that when combined with a male speedo, well, let your imagination wander - but not for too long.  One of the males on the beach was wearing his budgie smuggler with pride and we tried purposely not to look, but it's like when someone has left a little something in their teeth:  your eyes just naturally go...

Anywho (that's what Grandma says to change the subject),

We walked out onto the beach with all the paraphernalia.  Chairs, books, bags, skip balls, were set up near a tree and after applying a liberal covering of sunscreen, the girls screamed towards the water while I discreetly changed in the car.  After setting up camp, (and after my quick nap) I sat up and watched my family by the waters edge.  Funny how all humans have a similar desperate longing to be near any kind of water, but there we were smiling, swimming, and enjoying life as it occurred.  I watched Christine holding her wide brimmed hat on her head staring out across the water at our girls paddling across the channel paying absolutely no attention to Mr. Budgie Smuggler (thank the Lord.  Literally.) and I began to ask God for just one impossible thing...

A pause button.

I wished at that moment, at 3:30 in the afternoon on March 8, 2014, that time would stop for a while.  Well, not necessarily stop, but at least slow down so I could memorize it - just the details of the girls laughter, to record it so that I could play it on a rainy day when they aren't living with us any more; just the details of my wife's non-gray hair blowing in the wind.  As I've reached the age where white whiskers and gray temples are pretty normal, some people still think that she is in her twenties.  I haven't been carded since 2002.  Life isn't fair all the time.

Anywho,

There's a picture on our wall in our bedroom.  It's a professionally done photo of Christine during her modeling days and every morning as I awake much earlier than everyone else in the family, I look over her sleeping form, her hair askance across the pillow and I think to myself, "Yes, she does look even better now than when she was twenty-three when we were first married." 

So she sits on the sand covered by a sunsafe top, a sunsafe hat, sunscreen (we might as well been indoors, she is the safest sunsafe person I know.  I can't even walk out of the house in the morning without a query whether I've got my own hat) hair blowing in the wind and the deepest part of my soul has taken a photo that I'll stash away in the attic of my brain for that same rainy day.

Time never stops.  I wish it would, or at least slow down.  I hope you all have an experience soon that causes you to wish for the impossible pause button. 

God bless you on your journey.  Life is, ahem, a beach.