Behind the Lens | In Which I Detour to the Sea

A few months ago, Bredon disabled the CD player in the CRV, and we have been unable to listen to music with any real kind of volume when we drive. If you know me, you know this is a pretty big deal to me. I love listening to music while I drive. It is one of the best reset buttons I have. It’s how I talk to God and let off steam, and generally stay sane.

So last night, I tried hooking my iPhone into a set of speakers we bought at a yard sale on Saturday. About five minutes into my drive, things started getting a little weird. Like, cool, crazy, God weird.

The playlist was WACK. Directed right at me, on a shuffle. Ideas and thoughts and struggles and desires that had been tumbling over one another in my brain for months started coming together into something cohesive and real. I found myself wiping tears over old hurts, over things that had invited me into life in the first place.

In the middle of Vicky Beeching’s “Yesterday, Today, and Forever,” as she began singing “YAHWEH,” I started breathing again. Great, gulping gasps of air around tears as He reminded me that His very name for Himself is a breath that He breathed into me, that every breath I take glorifies Him because that is what He made me to do.

I forgot where I was going, and then there was the exit for the beach, and I knew I was going there, with Him. I climbed out of the car into the sticky salt air that wrapped itself around me like an embrace. I walked into the wind, forgot all sense of style as I went to the water and let the warm surf rise on my legs until I could go no further.

I saw another woman, scraping tears from her face, staring alone at the horizon. I wanted to hug her. I wanted to dive into the waves that held us back, to feel even more, to be free-er than I was. I was alive. I could hardly be contained.

I thought writer thoughts. I listened. I watched. I didn’t have my camera, just my iPhone to hold precarious over the water and attempt to capture the sense that God had made me for this, for the feeling, for the being, that my emotions were for Him and meant to be shared, that He was near to me.

I wanted to drown, but not to die. I had to live. Joy was bubbling up and over with every pass of the ocean against my feet. And peace. And God was God and I was me and I have eternity to figure my life out in Him who knows me more deeply than anyone ever can or wants to know me.

I will never be content without Him. The subtle ways that I’m often encouraged to leave Him out – they do more harm than good for my heart. And if there is one thing Kelly Sauer has to do, it is live from the heart. It’s why I was created, why God told Pete shortly after meeting me that I was His, that He would be the one to hold me and my heart and change me and protect me and give me and pour me out.

I’ve been feeling that beauty is not enough. That what I give won’t ever measure up to what someone else gives. I have been feeling so gauche and naive and underqualified to do even the things I do every day.

But last night, with the music playing loud, the speaker bass rushing in tandem with the wavesong, as I saw the world crying out praise, I realized that He made me enough – for Him, for anyone He puts into my life, for any situation that can come – because He didn’t intend for me to have to figure it out or make it okay.

He just wanted me to be me. With Him. Wherever I am.

FILED UNDER: Behind the Lens, iPhone, Personal, Snapshot