Brenden:

We left the Outer banks on Sunday evening. Jackie and I spent the day going to different spots up and down the beach mostly talking with some good friends about the next step in our lives. I kept not thinking about the end of the day. I knew it was going to be hard. I didn't realize how difficult it was until we were actually walking away from the beach.

Jackie and I were talking in our bed in Richmond that night. We were talking about why it had been so emotional that afternoon. It surprised me that I was so attached. I remember times when we would walk next to the ocean on a cold winter evening just because we could. I guess I thought I was ready to leave. I thought I was ready to move on to something else, but I didn't realize how much of a constant thing it had been for so long. Good or bad, the ocean was always there. From the beautiful clear beach days surfing and hanging out to the February windswept gray day, it had always been there.

The similarity then occurred to me. We love the ocean because it reminds us of God. Just knowing that the ocean was there even if the world was falling around us was a comfort. I started thinking about how no matter what Jackie and I had going on in our life we were always able to go to it and see something different about it but at the same time feel comforted by its existence. Not being able to understand the vastness of its entirety but still taken back by its beauty, seeing how peaceful and gentle the small waves are lapping against a still beach and respecting the awesome power of thirty foot waves were His characteristics. It was God in that ocean, a perfect picture, something Jackie and I could understand without having any understanding of it at all, something we could touch, feel, and get lost in.