The sun was shining on me all weekend, maybe I was just short on Vitamin D, but I can’t put into words just how healing the hours on a warm sunny beach was to my soul. This is a small miracle on the Oregon coast. You never know what you will get in the little micro climate we call beach, but when it is glorious- windfree, sunny days- you take it as a blessing.

That and slowing down the pace enough to actually find the moment and suddenly the burden of family and growing children was a gift, the entire lens shifted and I could see through grateful eyes. That is the prayer answered, the moments when we can see our lives as the gift that they are. I would like to believe that I could have come to that place had the overcast skies never broken, but I know myself. It would have been too easy to keep wishing for what I didn’t have, lamenting how life wasn’t exactly how I wanted it.

You’d think we/I would grow out of that useless behavior by now. I have read enough meditation texts that I know deeply the waste of time my energy fuels with the discontented longing for life to be some other way. It is just a short trip from there to a tiny thought fueling a fast spiral into some familiar resentment. I have spent way too much of the last few months battling back to eventide.

So thank you to the sun, to the ocean roaring in and going out, to the warm soft sand under my feet. Thank you to a world which was just as I had wished it, so that I can remember how beautiful life really is- all the time, whether it is to my specifications or not.

I was reading about the recently disclosed letters of Mother Teresa during this coming to the light of mine and tried to imagine a woman who brought light and hope to millions of people during her lifetime, and who all the while agonized about her own personal connection to God. Was it a mask as she claimed in her darker moments, the smile and comfort that touched so many lives, or did she just not get that each of those connections was her being loved by God.

They referred to her 50 some years of searching as a crisis in faith, but I am not sure if I would agree, it might have actually been her triumph of faith that allowed her to make her ministry one of the great forces of love in history. It feels like a deep lesson to me, the girl who is always touting the power to sustain love- you don’t have to feel connected to do the work of connecting. Love is love whether we feel it or not. Believing in it, acting for it even when we most long for it- might be all we get- and every now and again- the sun is shining on us.