I’m dragging the suitcase up from the basement. Each summer, Lorraine and I spend a week at the beach, usually with other family members. In previous years, I’ve notched up plenty of bruises and abrasions while body surfing with my great-nephews. Their decades-younger rubber bodies seem immune to the surges and slaps of tropical storm-tossed breakers; mine, on the other hand, always comes home battered.

But this year, we’re largely going it alone. The reasons are legion, but a combination of economics, our niece having her first baby, family illness, conflicting schedules, and innumerable other hiccups will put Lorraine and me into our usual two-bedroom rented condo all by ourselves. We’ll have Aunt Rita over for supper several times, of course, and Cousin Julie will visit, but this will be more of a “desert experience” for us than we’ve had in years.

In a former life, when Lorraine and I were both full tilt at demanding careers, we built a house in the marshes and used to escape to it as often as we could…sometimes monthly. We craved the enforced silence of no people, no email, no newspapers, or magazines, or television.  We trekked and boated through the marshes, lunching next to wall-to-wall carpets of fiddler crabs. We fed smoked mullet tidbits to blue crabs and watched as they tried to prevent minnows, conchs, and other crustaceans from getting a share of the spoils.

But this year, we’ll be at a real desert, because beaches are just that. Unlike salt marshes, the pristine white coasts are relatively devoid of life. Yes, there are mole crabs and ghost crabs; there are dolphins and minnows and sandpipers; there are even sea turtles tractor-treading their way up the slopes to lay eggs. But much of the beach is stripped clean by sun, wind and wave. It speaks not so much of God’s fecundity, as do the salt marshes, but of His changelessness.

It’s odd to ponder changelessness at the beach, because at first glance everything there would seem to be in flux; dunes meander, sea oats shift and scramble; houses are built and then blow away.

And yet, the sound of the sea is always the same: the roaring of ripe waves as they crash, the piping of gulls and terns, the sea breeze tuning up empty coke bottles. And the smell of the sea is always the same: tangy, wild, thick like soup, the hint of decay beneath the smell of suntan lotion.

These things get under your skin. They touch that part of you that was once a toddler, digging holes just beyond the surf and munching sand-spiked tomato sandwiches under beefy blue umbrellas. When we’re at the beach, we’re the same people we were last time, and the time before, and the time before that. All that’s happened away from the waves is just filler.

This is timelessness…a rupture in routine; a tabling of the typical. With clocks stopped, we see the beach as truly “charged with the grandeur of God.” On silver shores, the Infinite stoops down and watches us play in the sand. He whispers to us in dappled winds. And when towering August clouds are tinted pink, then gold, then purple with setting sun, I cannot help but think, pointing to regal billows, “that’s where God lives!”

So, back I go to packing. I’ll take my sketchbook, of course. And, if I’m feeling particularly industrious, I may even take a simple set of watercolours.

But I probably won’t use either. You see, when you’re spending the week with God, you don’t really need to be doing anything else.

–    Jef Murray