Beach Front Cottage....wide wraparound porch...windows over-looking the dunes...wide, wide beach now swept clean by the tide of all the debris of shells, rocks, shards of sea glass ground smooth in the tumbling of the tide.
ECU plays Marshall tonight in Greenville. This is the 40th anniversary of the plane crash that occurred as the Marshall team was returning home from the ECU game. There will be a moment of silence...a tiny dot of silence to commemorate the silenced voices and interrupted lives of those on the plane. Do their lives move forward with Christ in heaven? Were they ready?
I heard a plane crash survivor talking about the responses of his fellow passengers on the plane. Some of them went to their deaths praying to God, entrusting their lives to Him; others cursed at Him.
If death should take me unaware,
I would my mouth be filled--
Not with curses--but with prayer.
And since our time of death's unknown.....?
Today we are heading off to the Wright memorial, perhaps to Jockey's Ridge. A sunrise and a sunset trip to the top of Jockey's Ridge was always a part of our family trips to Nags Head. We began to come when the water was yucky and smelled like sulphur, when all the cottages were gray weathered boards, unairconditioned with windows open on the sides to the air. The dunes now covered with golden rod and thorny bushes were blanketed with waving sea oats and underneath the waving fronds were the burrs, pesky little golden orbs that clung to our clothes and made us yelp and hop as we ran barefoot through them. It was all a part of the experience--along with the fried spots....I only remember the fish, the dunes, the sea, the sun rising or falling from the heights of the ridge. Where are the memories of the family, the uncles, the aunts, the grandparents who were setting tables, cooking the food, putting us to bed? It was a wild free, unfettered life lived totally outside of the lives of the adults. Where are the memories of the ocean swims? Gone. Gone. I know who was there because of the pictures in the albums.
Sophie the lab we are watching for my brother and sister-in-law while they are at the ECU homecoming is pacing through the house looking for them. Every now and then she comes to put her cold nose under my hand on the keyboard looking for a pat. She's a sweet dog.
Time to go.....
Blessings,
Day by day, day by day, day by day
Lord, three things I pray,
To see Thee more clearly,
To love Christ more dearly,
To follow Him more nearly,
Day by day by day.... Amen
