Today I woke up still feeling a little sick. So with my Sunday afternoon being free, I decided that staying in the cold house would not be an option and I headed down to beach to let the warm sun do its wonders to this cold. Although I was not healed from the sun, I did receive some pretty cool revelations about some things I have been thinking about the past couple of days.
As I was walking down the beach with warm sand between my toes and the occasional cold tide hitting my feet, I was in search, and determined, of finding the perfect spot. You what I am talking about… the one with no screaming kids, less people, and no vendors offering you knockoffs. I settled down, despite the fact that I couldn’t find my ideal spot, laid down my towel, put my Ipod on, and opened my book.
As I was reading, I began to get a distracted by my thoughts and started thinking. These thoughts went something like this:
I can’t believe I am here. I am lying here with the Mediterranean Sea in front of me, the snow covered Sierra Nevada’s to my left, and my tiny white village behind me. I started thinking about the worship we had the night before and how I fell asleep last night to the same picture that I had when I was worshiping… a massive amount of people altogether singing and worshiping God in the rain. As the rain fell, no one was running away but enjoying ever minute of it- it was a renewal for everyone.
I then began thinking about Friday night. I remembered that just a few blocks from where I was lying I worked for the night. Somehow I ended up with a job passing out fliers (it was pretty bad so I decided to tell the man it wasn’t worth it…) on the street in the cold night. It was an experience. I met a lot of people, two of which were prostitutes from Ghana, working right down the street from me. I talked to them as much as I could… they were busy trying to get customers and I was trying to pass out these darn fliers. They didn’t want to be in Spain, they want to be home in Ghana, one of the girls said to me.
So as I lay there in the sand, the verse that has been stuck in my head for the past two weeks seemed to tie all my thoughts together.
That my friends is why I am here, to love. A simple verse that I have never really paid attention to before but gives me purpose in everything. That is to love these girls from Ghana, that is to love the kids yelling ridiculous slurs at them, to love the men that have taken advantage of them, and to love this world so much that my desire is to just love (worship) Him back, even in the rain, because it is His love that renews us each day.
