Translating a World on the Edge

I spent my childhood summers on Panama City Beach, Florida at a cottage my grandfather built for my grandmother , a surprise for their twenty-fifth anniversary. The beach was something very familiar, the Easter Basket colors of its water–lime green, purple, cobalt blue. Its sand white as sugar, its dunes barely able to be climbed by a young child, and challenging to the point of necessity for a pre-teen. But the most impressive characteristic of the beach were the waves.

A wave can startle. A wave can hit you in the face. And unless you’re careful, a wave can bring you down.

Isn’t life like that, too?

Don’t we often have wave after wave of surprises, disappointments, and even devastations in life?

But when we make the right judgments, the same waves that bring these things also bring delight, laughter, and that refreshing past-time–fun.

There are scientific principals that effect the waves on a beach, make them less or more.

There are principled and unprincipled people who effect the waves in our life as well, making it more or less.

Who are those people in our lives ?

On a beach, there are some wonderful waves we’d play in, and some violent waves we wouldn’t go near for fear of danger.

In life there are some wonderful people who care deeply for us, and there are some whose lies we fall for time after time. Shouldn’t we discriminate between the two? Shouldn’t we consider the dangers, or benefits of each?

All this concerns what we’re actually after, what we’re really looking for in our lives. We can pretend we’re seeking Truth, but unless we really try to discover and accept what Truth actually is, we’re hypocrites.

The Truth is that there are some people who can help us along, who will walk with us if we let them–people who mirror the image of God in which we are made. And there are people who pretend to be our best friend, but who actually who mirror the Father of Lies.

Which of these should we turn to? Which of these should we walk with? Which of these should we trust during our journey toward eternal life?