He Makes All Things New

No landscape on earth speaks to me like that of the mighty ocean kissing the earth at the shoreline.
Someday when Im old and gray, thats where you'll find me.
Permanently.
I'll never tire of it.  The sight of the globe of fire sinking behind sand dunes reflecting shades of crimson over the evening tide. The gulls calling to eachother as the breeze cools the once-blistering sand beneath my feet.
Here's where Ill be.
One wrinkled old hand holding C's, one clutching a big straw hat as we stroll at sunset.

This place.
Here I can hear Him whisper.
Here I pause long enough to really listen.
Here, in this vast expanse, I feel so small and insignificant.  And yet here I sense anew, that in all this, in all this, He knows my name.  The God of the universe, who created all this and knows how many grains of sand are on the shore, He calls me Beloved.

How humbling.

The children played for endless hours on the beach this week.  C joined them in establishing a sand-castle worthy of withstanding an onslought of hurricane force winds.
A mote.  A wall.  A dam.
Deep.  Wide.  Thick.  High.  Strong.  Solid.  Secure.
It seemed that any battering would leave only insignificant damage to their skillfully constructed monument.

We called it a day and pack it in retreating to our hotel.
Night falls.
Morning comes.
When the first light of new day stretches all pink and golden on the horizon, I stand at our balcony overlooking a very different seascape.  Even the early-morning walkers have not yet left their footprints. The tide is rolling out a red carpet to a new day.
Where once the deep etching of our sand sketch left divots and spires of sand, now the sea has leveled the surface and left a clean palette.  The slate has been wiped clean.  The canvas is fresh for painting.  Whitecaps retreat leaving a smooth scape and unspoiled shoreline.

I marvel at the profound correlation to life.  My personal life.  My messy life.
Ive erected my own stalwart walls from fibers of disappointment and particles of disillusionment.  Bitter belief that somethings will always be just as they are...just a little bit....damaged.
There are broken places.  Cracks in the foundation.  Scars seem irreparable.  And doubt and defeat, my constant companions, accept that it will always be so.
Ive grown accustomed to my marred existence.
What to do with those seemingly unchangeable imperfections and "mistakes" that are etched deeply in my life?
Hoping for more, and enduring another disappointment, is possibly more painful than acceptance of what is.

"He makes all things new"...
I hear it.  The recognizable whisper of Truth.  The breeze carries the promise I know in my mind yet do not dare to embrace sometimes.
All things.  No exceptions.

Dare I hope for more?  Gently, relentlessly, a glimmer of hope begins to threaten those barriers and sieges the walls.  Foaming waves dashing the shore, Truth bombards the walls Ive built for protection.  They begin to erode and I am undone.

Hope against hope, I wonder how to transfer the promises I know in my head into fleshed out true belief.  Life altering, life sustaining belief.  I desire my life to evidence those things I stake claim to...
Faith.
Hope.
Trust.
Patience in the painful-at-times process.

All things...new.
Dawn comes slowly.
My cynicism begins to unravel...another defense crumbles.

He makes all things new.
Only He can.  No big eraser of my own.  Only a surrender to Him to take the broken pieces...to take all things.  Even those Ive lost hope of ever changing.
All things.
None too messy.  Too blemished.  Too imperfect.  Too complicated that He cant wipe the slate clean and make something beautiful.
Something new.