We Are the Ocean

We are the ocean, you and I.

The accumulated courage and gifts and incredible riches that lie within each of us overwhelm the sand in sheer weight and glory. Strange how we rarely understand this, how we can journey through our lives wondering--fearing--that we are not enough.

There's so many people in the world--sometimes I think about how each person, each dwelling has a whole life all its own--mothers, fathers, siblings, children, cousins--like waves going out and out and out. All across the country and the world, each life is lived in full color, Tragedies. Triumphs.
Precocious toddlers. Talented teens. Aging parents. It boggles my mind to ponder the multiplied millions of ripples going out from every person, but God knows us each one.

I love that.

He knows each individual "us" as if we were the only one He ever created. That intimately. He not only knows the names and the number of stars in the sky, or the sand on all the seashores, He knows the number of hairs on each of our heads. We are not "the masses" to him. We are known. Valued. Loved. He is not overwhelmed by the ocean of humanity that lives and breathes and calls out to Him in need and in love and in etremities often. No, not overwhelmed. Quite the contrary:

He is delighted with us!

One Raindrop Raises the Sea

 Everyday I get up and I write in hopes that something I say will encourage, will lift, will touch someone else so that they can go through their day not because they have to, but because they get to. I want to write in such a way that those who read my words will glimpse that life is not a given, but a gift.

Sometimes what I do in my life seems very small. Like one raindrop on the surface of the sea. And yet, as has been said, one raindrop, though very tiny, does indeed raise the sea. So if I continue to get out of bed, continue to pull words together from somewhere within who I am and have the bravery to put them out where other eyes can see and study them, I will have made an impact. Perhaps not a crater, nor even much of an indentation, and no great fanfare will accompany the process. In the early hours before the sun brings on the day and only small nocturnal critters are awake, I write. It's a quiet thing (save for the clicking of computer keys): sometimes almost a meditation, this reaching within myself for unformed words; to bring to life ideas, to clothe in concrete terms what exists only in one person. Me. 

It's strange, isn't it--though academically we understand that there is only one of each of us, so often we do not feel that we are enough. Just me. Just you. Our essense without all the trappings. And yet--if I did not get up and write, the earth would be the poorer. Few might mark the absence or mourn the lack, but that's all right. I don't write so that the whole of humanity can say, "Wow! Look at her." I write to give wings to what lies in my heart--small and great things, soft and harsh things, sad and glad things--because it brings me joy. And I am fueled with the hope that those words once honed and polished may slip inside another's soul and give them similar courage to be who they are and to know they are enough. I'm content with this hope, this knowledge that a seed sown will bring forth a harvest according to its kind. I write for the one child, the one adult, the one fellow sojourner, that they may gain courage to continue to be who they were made to be, and that we all might know and understand that truly, one raindrop raises the sea.

And all of us together--we are the ocean.