Sabbath

It feels funny to have a laptop on the front porch up here.  In a place surrounded by water and gravel and sand and trees.  Where reception is spotty and people gather together at night around bon fires in wet bathing suits rather than in someone's living room around a screen.

I am listening to my daughter play outside , squealing, with four other children, running in and out of their houses because our yards all run together and I am slowly adjusting to the way things are.  The rhythm of the every day where no one wears a watch and it takes two hours to get an ice cream but the cream was fresh as of this morning and churned during the day while I was in the water in the sunshine.  Where my child can announce that she is going outside to play and I do not peer frantically out the window every 5 minutes because she is safe.

I swim laps here every morning after breakfast. Not as intentional exercise, though I suppose it is, but as a way to right myself.  The cold water closing in around my limbs and lungs and it feels nothing nothing like drowning and everything like living.  Clean, cold and alive and I turn around for another lap toward the ropes, to where my feet can't touch the bottom until I can't think or breathe save giving thanks for being.

There is music on the dock played on beat-up guitars and teenagers daring each other to dive backwards off the docks and sand in every fold of every sheet.

Everything takes longer and no one is in a rush to get it because they know that the waiting is what makes it worth it.

I read a book that was so magical I cried real tears when it ended and walked the main street with the other tourists knowing more than they and less than the locals.  I am a strange summer transplant in kissing hellos to cashiers and neighbors and saying goodbye for the winters.

I've spent each evening in the kitchen slicing mangos for curry and sweating shallots for cassoulet while the sun sets on the front porch to the sounds of my family splashing on the beach.

I've drank more wine than I would ever care to admit to under usual circumstances, but uncharacteristically  haven't felt badly about it once because it was lavish and extravagant and there was a void in my life for those two, very things.

We have dreamed together as a family and regrouped and laughed and argued some but reveled mostly in who we are and who we could be and what we were made for.

Mostly, I have felt the truth that God is bigger than churches and buildings and boxes and brokenness. Than the little world I built around myself, and ultimately, Him.

I have gone without a Sabbath for so long I am grateful He gave me the opportunity to string them all together, in a row.