one thing

Tara and I are with her mother and sisters in Myrtle Beach, SC, visiting friends of her family. Bill and Georgiana are terrific people … I’ve been constantly impressed by their hospitality. We’ve played games, gone shopping, and relaxed on the beach together all week long. (This is my second visit to their home, a beachfront condo on the eighth floor of … well, a condo building.)

This afternoon, after most of the tourists (are we excluded?) left, we were still outside enjoying the sunshine, cool breeze, and ocean waves. I decided on a whim to walk out to the waterfront – the ocean was going out, just after high tide – and carve my name in the sand with a nearby large piece of shell. After a wave flooded my D, my goal turned into just carving my initials. After a couple more minutes, I decided to turn the reestablished D into the moat of a sand castle. For the next half hour or so, I worked on what might be my first ever completely self-motivated, self-constructed sand castle. It wasn’t very fancy, but I did include a thick wall (to prevent further floodings), a little spiral road from the moat’s bridge up to the top of the hill (situated in the middle of the resulting island), and a little building (hardly a castle) with multiple levels and shell decorations.

Tara said she liked the spiral shape. It was kind of accidental – the wall had an opening toward the shore but then curved around clockwise in a circular type of spiral, and the road to the top spiraled upward counterclockwise. As I was building the building, the whole scene kind of reminded me of that one place in the Lord of the Rings movies … a castle with a big front yard overlooking a steep cliff.

The tide has gone out and is probably almost completely come back in now, so my sand castle has probably been reduced to a lump of sand. But I had fun building it… it was very relaxing.

In other news, I read today about the Episcopal church’s current (continuing) struggles about ordaining homosexual bishops, as well as PCUSA’s reception of a paper suggesting changes to how that group understands and presents the Trinity. What crazy things we Christians are doing these days…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 21st, 2006 at 12:38 am and is filed under life, seminary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.