Hopeful Hearts Ministry

After three years Crystal Beach has been renewed.  Once considered the ‘ground zero’ of Hurricane Ike it has now been given new life and was a perfect setting for a girls weekend.

Nine of us got together  to celebrate four birthdays and to simply relax.  We are all moms of middle school students at the Catholic school here and so we had plenty to ‘shed’ as we are all going through the precarious road of raising teenagers.

Early Saturday morning before everyone arrived I took the time to walk down to the beach and fill up with the serenity and peace of God that resonates when I’m near the ocean.  On my run I thought about a comment that my friend made as we drove into Crystal Beach.  She is the owner of the house where we stayed and we were talking about the amount of destruction Ike left behind.  There were rows and rows of houses gone, obliterated.  Driving along the beach front highway we still could see remnants of the storm, a hollowed out Cheveron station, and a beach house left standing on two shaky stilts the rest of it looking as if it had been blown up by a bomb.  My friend said (all paraphrased of course), “You know I always hear that the beach is like heaven but I think it’s a great example of heaven and hell.”

“Why do you say that?”  I asked.

“Because when we first bought our house one year before Ike hit I would sit at the mouth of the ocean, letting the ways calm me down and lift my spirits.   But it was that same water, those same waves that rose like a wall over this entire island swallowing it whole and causing such distress.  It was like hell.”

“Yeah, I can see that except hell is the absense of God and I bet God was here for many at that time,” I offered.

“Sure, of course He was but it is amazing to me that something that depicts the true radiance of God could also be used to demolish.”

On the run I looked at all of the newly built houses that lined the beach and about all the ways in which my friend commented on getting to know her neighbors through that tough time and how the community picked up and helped one another.  God does allow destruction to happen and at times it feels like living through hell but how awesome it is to know that at this juncture we still have the grace to see His hand pick up the pieces around us and set us on a new course to rebuild our lives for the better than what they were before.