Although it may boggle the mind in today’s more environmentally conscious world, for many decades of the 20th century the good people of Fort Bragg, California, hurled their household refuse over the cliff and onto the nearby beach, just 16 miles north of Mendocino in beautiful northern California. They threw their garbage and their old cars and appliances. They scattered their newspapers and flung their soiled rags. And they pitched their discarded glass bottles. Lots of them. And those bottles? They are still there, sort of.
Although the city finally closed the dump and began cleaning it up in the 1960s, there is a sparkling, magical remnant left from that time. “Sea glass” was created by decade after decade of pounding waves that first broke and then wore down the discarded bottles into what today are small, smooth, glass-bottle-colored “stones.” They have become small bits of found treasure, salvaged by tourists and locals alike ever since.
Unwanted, discarded, thrown, broken, worn-down and…finally…found and treasured. Sounds like us.
So often we live and wallow in the castoffs of our past. Old wounds, bad relationships, long-held grudges, and serious addictions and sins have been left dumped on our minds and souls. They weigh us down and hold us back. Garbage, mucking up the works.
Hurled and broken, we often stay exactly where we have landed and nothing changes, for there is nothing there to move us. We become like that 1940s Ford pickup stashed behind your uncle’s broken-down barn on the side of a blue highway. We look like a truck but nothing works. We can’t move until something moves us.
I’ve come to know over the years that the all-loving and forgiving God that sits at the center of my life is no magician. God does not wave a wand, utter an abracadabra, and quickly take away all the pain and garbage. Neither is God like the tractor-towed mechanical device I saw on a recent vacation that sifts through the beach sand at the end of every day removing the litter, sea weed, broken glass, and debris so I can wake up to a pristine beach for my daily walk. Those machines, I learned while writing this essay, are called “sandbonis,” a play on words derived from the Zamboni machines that clean the ice between periods of a hockey game.
I have become convinced over my 66 years that God does, in fact, love us and knows us by name. I don’t believe for a moment that God has abandoned us just because there was not a divine sandboni that immediately sifted us out of the muck during those moments of our lives when we felt unwanted, abused, discarded, thrown, or broken. That would be a pretty small definition of a pretty big God, for God is not about keeping our lives safe, tidy and well groomed.
So where was God during all those difficult, soul-numbing moments of our lives? God was working on us, moving us little by little toward something new. For me, God was an ever-present force during the pain and fear of three years of chemotherapy some 15 years ago, a wave of grace more powerful than chemical bonds, occurring over and over and over, pounding and breaking me into smaller pieces so that I might recover and become some small fragment of the beauty of what I was born to be. Of what God needed me to be. It just took some time to round my sharp corners, erase the past abuses, and make me available to someone else who needed a bit of glass-colored joy.
Whether our wounds are physical, mental, spiritual or some paralyzing combination that keeps us feeling like forgotten treasure beneath the sands of time and the pounding waves, our faith in God give us hope that there is always the offer of grace and a shot at redemption, another chance at renewal and new life. But it will take some time, decades perhaps, for beauty rarely comes in one brief shining moment and it can’t happen just because we wish it so.
Rather, we are called to immerse ourselves in the cool and ever-moving waters of God and then let the movement and the years create something new, something bold and colorful and shiny. Something that God can pick up and say, “this is mine…this is beautiful.”
Finally, found and treasured. Just as we are made to be.
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