There's More to Life Than Surf and Sand

Do your limitations and failures confront you, haunt you, dog you with persistence? Are you hiding from your scars? Is that why they continue to bleed? To what, where, who have you sought the old familiar refuge?

Sooner or later we find ourselves alone with no desire for Facebook, Twitter, Tweet. Even the Ipod hangs loosely from our neck. Is the silence painful? Do you know the person that stares back at you from the mirror?

Learning to confront those fears outside of us is a good thing, but confronting the fears that come from somewhere deep within is a different matter. It is much easier to smother them with the welcomed, growing noise of busyness, but sooner or later they return to face us face to face.

Richard Rohr said that "Cosmetic piety takes away our anxiety about God and about ourselves, but it does not address the real and subtle ways that we "lose our soul."" Cosmetic piety only exists in the shallowness of noise and busyness. Move past the rowdy, disorderly, raucous thoughts and activities that populate the beach. Move out into the deeper water where you find yourself alone, disconnected from the all too familiar people, things and distractions that isolate, quarantine and blind you to the knowledge that you have outgrown your childish fancies and childish toys.

To whom or what are you accountable, responsible? Does your God wait patiently for you to look beyond your little schemes and dreams to be a part of something greater? Silence waits for you to be still, to halt your racing thoughts and enter into the quiet. In the stillness of the deep water, beyond the imposition of scheduled times and regulated schedules reality waits patiently. Is reality a choice between where you came from or where you are going?

Some folks run until they die; never still long enough to consider who they are, what they're doing, or what's important. Some folks never get beyond the beach; never lose sight of shore and never discover there's more to life than surf and sand.