Tomorrow we pack up the car and hit the open road. After about twenty hours of driving through mostly rural Canada, we'll cross over the 8 mile long Confederation Bridge and we'll find ourselves driving through the pastoral beauty that is Prince Edward Island.
These past few months, along with two of my close friends, I read a wonderful book written by Steve DeWitt entitled Eyes Wide Open. It's a book about beauty, and about worship.
There was one part of DeWitt's book that, more than any other, made me long to set foot on the red clay soil of PEI. He writes this:
"I go to beaches for the ocean. Specifically, for the opportunity to stare into infinity. (Before you seek to correct me, I realize that oceans aren't infinite, but they look like it from the beach.) Life provides few opportunities to do this. Rather, my life provides few opportunities to do this. Maybe your life is like mine--a swirl of priorities that are always pressing, always begging for my attention. I am constantly staring at finite things: finite problems, finite food, finite laundry, finite people--including myself in the mirror. My life and my thoughts are so frustratingly finite.
...My problems seem overwhelming and unfixable. My relationships are unsatisfying. My everything is too anything but what I want it to be. I hate it.
So what do I do? I go to an ocean bech at sunset. I stare into infinity, and something happens in my heart. The overwhelming finitude within me shrinks. Why? I'm not sure, but I think it has something to do with rays of light from millions of miles away arching through the sky in shades of purple and pink. Waves sent from somewhere on a kamikaze mission to crash at my feet. A large and brilliant globe sinking into the ocean like it has decided to just give up.
...We need infinity. Not that we can understand it. But only with it does life make any sense. That's why I like walking ocean beaches. Because for me, the infinity of the horizon is a glimpse at what the God who made it is like. Breathtaking. Beautiful. Big."
For the next two weeks I'll be offline, enjoying the good gifts of rest and family, beholding the beauty of Prince Edward Island, and beholding, I pray, the beauty of the Creator.
