Amy speaks with Jodie Gerling, an advocate for families facing medical challenges. They explore the transformative role of creativity in healing and processing emotions. Drawing from her personal experiences, Jody uses creativity as a tool for grounding herself, finding strength and the comfort of home even when she’s in the hospital and embracing gratitude. She has found that creativity leads her to present-moment living and noticing the little God moments in the stress of complicated things.
Episode 147: October 31, 2023
Key Moments:
[1:51] Creativity does matter
[5:14] Staying present is hard but necessary work.
[9:48] Don’t have a creative bone in your body?
[14:08] Pack something for ourselves when going to the hospital
[21:32] Our past hospital memories can creep up and turn to fear
Resources:
Jodie’s Reading in Our Story Magazine
Jodies Website.: Jodiegerling.com
If you enjoyed the show:
Amy speaks with Jodie Gerling, an advocate for families facing medical challenges. They explore the transformative role of creativity in healing and processing emotions. Drawing from her personal experiences, Jody uses creativity as a tool for grounding herself, finding strength and the comfort of home even when she’s in the hospital and embracing gratitude. She has found that creativity leads her to present-moment living and noticing the little God moments in the stress of complicated things.
Episode 147: October 31, 2023
Key Moments:
[1:51] Creativity does matter
[5:14] Staying present is hard but necessary work.
[9:48] Don’t have a creative bone in your body?
[14:08] Pack something for ourselves when going to the hospital
[21:32] Our past hospital memories can creep up and turn to fear
Resources:
Jodie’s Reading in Our Story Magazine
Jodies Website.: Jodiegerling.com
If you enjoyed the show:
Ep.147: How Creativity Keeps Us Grounded and Present with Jodie Gerling
Amy J Brown:I think too that moms, we don't often think about when we're heading into a hospital stay, and sometimes that's emergent or it's planned. You're like packing for your other kids,, you're taking care that we don't think we need to do something for us. And it's hard enough just to eat and drink and rest when you're in that kind of stage of a hospitalization. But I love that you're encouraging moms to say, what can you pack? Can it be a magazine, a House Beautiful magazine?Can it be a book of poetry? Can it be adult coloring with gel pens? Just something that keeps our mind on the present.
Welcome to Take Heart, a podcast about creating space for connection, hope and joy. As a mom to a child with disabilities or special needs, we want you to feel connected and encouraged as we navigate this messy, emotional and joy-filled life together. Welcome to episode 147 of Take Heart. Today, as our guest, we have Jodie Gerling. Jodie is a wife to a worship pastor, a mama to a teen boy, a tween girl, and a nine-year-old daughter who's medically fragile and has many physical and special needs. Between homeschooling and housework, therapies and doctor appointments, Jodie sneaks in time at the computer to write or at the table to spread out art supplies and create. Her personal goal is to find rest and beauty in the everyday mundane and thank the Lord for all those tiniest of moments in our ordinary day. Listen in as I chat with Jodie today.
Amy:Jodie, thank you so much for being here today.
Jodie:Yeah, I'm excited.
Amy: Well, this month on the podcast, we have been talking about the fun topic of suffering and faithfulness. Right? Yeah, right, like both of them. Like it's like wah-wah, this is a really not fun topic, but it's part of our lives as special needs moms.I follow Jodi on Instagram and then we've been chatting and become friends. And one thing I've always appreciated about your Instagram feed is how you're always creating. And I know your life.I know now I've got to know you better, that it's not like you're sitting around with all kinds of free time on your hands. So as we talk about faithfulness and suffering, you had written somewhere that God feels near to us when in creativity and uses it to help us in affliction. So I have kind of a two part question for you. The first one is why does creativity matter? And secondly, how has creativity benefited you in times, in difficult times?
Jodie: Why does creativity matter? I think it matters because I was reading a lot through Genesis and Exodus lately and just how God puts so much thought and specification into creation. Even though, you know, it's seven day creation story, right? But when you get down to the nitty gritty of it, just how he thought through every single thing, down to like, there was a mist that hovered over the ground that watered everything and kept everything alive until the flood came along. And you see that God pays attention to every little detail. I think creativity is important because it helps us to pay attention to the little details and not be so consumed with the big picture in the longterm because my brain is wired such that I get stuck on the what ifs of tomorrow and on the what ifs of, you know, we were told with Chloe,that she wasn't going to make it to birth and then she wasn't going to make it past birth and then she could live three days, three weeks, three months, three years. She is nine. And I got so caught up early on in looking at the, well, what if we hit age three, then what's going to happen that I wasn't slowing down and looking at the details of each day we had with her. I think that it's important whether it's.photography, you have to slow down to get the right angle, or you're gonna end up taking pictures like my husband where your thumb's in front of the camera. Or me. Or blurry. Yeah. You're gonna take these blurry shots because you're rushing through it. I think so much of slowing down, it's the opposite of rushing, right? Creativity, you can't rush creativity, and it was a really good thing for me to learn because I was in this fast-paced, everything has to happen, we have to get all the things done.
That's how the anxious brain works, I think for me. And especially in life as a medically fragile family, we had to watch every detail. And you kind of have to be three steps ahead of where your child is. You have to know if that sickness is coming. You have to know if there might be a hospital trip coming. I would get, especially during cold and flu seasons, I would get so anxious anticipating that possible thing that I wouldn't slow down. And so my whole body would feel rushed all the time.
It took me learning to pause and create things to slow me down. And it was when I was finally able to do that and be present to the moment that I could see God working. I was so consumed with God working the big things out that I wasn't thinking through, well, where is he today? Because the more we're rushing around and thinking on our own anxious thoughts, we don't hear him as much.
Painting, for example, I have to stop and consider the components of what I'm painting,
medium am I going to use? What paper do I want to use? What brush? What brush stroke? What hue? Is that hue right? Can I mix something else? And then my mind is slow to thinking on those things that I'm not off here in left field. I'm not over here thinking on everything big because I'm focused on the little things and then those little creations make me go, oh it's so cool that you know God created these colors. It's so neat that God took me outside today so that I could see the flowers that were blooming that caused me to want to come inside and slow down and spend my time beside Chloe today painting or creating whatever it may be.
Amy:Yeah, I just wanna add something to that though, before we go to the second question is, I write a lot about present moment living because I feel like our anxiety brain has a way of scanning towards the future for the next worst thing that's gonna happen or looking back over our shoulder to what we could have done differently. And to stay in the present moment is very hard to do, but I think it's holy work and it's meaningful work and it's necessary work. But I don't know that to the mom out there that's going through like hard season or at the hospital, I don't know if she'd think to pick up creativity as the first tool. Like, I don't think, cause you know, I think people think, okay, I have all this time and I can get all these things out. So.
I love what you said about how that tool specifically has helped you even in those hard moments. So that's my follow-up question really is what, how, first of all, how has it helped you in hard times? Because you've had, I think you told me you had a nine-month Ronald McDonald house in the hospital stay. You have totally have worn that out. The Ronald McDonald house, you've been there a lot, you know, everything. So how in those moments?
And have they helped you on a spiritual calming level? And also specifically, what kind of things did you do at the hospital bed or that helped you? Does that make sense? Like how did that help you in times like that?
Jodie:Yeah, so to back up a little bit, we didn't just have a nine month stay. We started off with a five month NICU stay and then we came home for about six months and then her shunt was closing in our heart and that started a nine month stay. And there were various hospital stays after and in between and all throughout. So yeah, we're kind of pros, I guess. I didn't have painting. I didn't have that when we first started this journey. I always had the creative side of me. Like I love to write. I love to do photography. But I didn't know how to utilize that because I didn't know how to use it in the present because I didn't know how to stay in the present. It's been,I can say years, plural now, of trauma counseling to even know what the heck the present is.And what you talked about about, like your brain is so pulled between, well, what's the future and what's the past, that when you're pulled those two different directions, that's when the brain kind of sets on fire and goes, well, we can't go both ways. You have to choose where you're gonna be at, and that's hard. When I was in the NICU, what did creativity look like? It was the smallest of things. It was like,a friend I got to know because her daughter was just around the corner from our pod. It was her giving me a half-read magazine and saying, you got to do something other than just stare at your child. It's too hard to just take all that in constantly and getting lost in a magazine, reading something helped me set aside the hard things, the beeps, the sounds I was hearing, all the things. But she also gave me a half eaten candy bar.at the same time. So she was like, I can't offer you, but this is what I have. We still joke about it. So just like finding the little ways to pause. Did I eat that illegal candy bar because you're not supposed to have food in the NICU? Absolutely. Did my nurse turn her back and let that happen? Absolutely. But I had just that quiet still moment for just a few moments even. So just learning to pick up a few moments at a time, a few minutes at a time.
You really had to work hard in the NICU actually to separate between the life that was happening around you, the doctors rounding, the beeps going off, the nurses in and out, all of the things, and then just kind of be still beside your own child. Creativity didn't sneak in until I started journaling. That's kind of where I started with it was journaling. Journaling as a way to process kind of emotions, but also journaling through the blog that we had. We had started when we found out about her diagnosis at the 20 Week Ultrasound. Journaling or blogging was what helped us to process things and hopes of helping others to process or just understand what we were walking through. And so for like, for the moms who I think might say, well, I don't have a creative bone in my body, well, your creativity might be sewing. Take that with you to the hospital. It might be crocheting.
My crocheting is not actually a thing because it just does not happen. I can't even describe it. My daughter's been trying to get me to do it again lately and it just, yeah. But whatever it is that you enjoy, take that. Take it on the appointment days. Take it, you know, if it's a certain book or an art book. Like I love, Ruth Cho-Simon has these beautiful illustrated books. I'm a vintage book girl, the e-book.It's a thing out there somewhere, I know about it. I'm the same way. But give me the paper, man. And then I dog-eer the pages and my husband's like, oh, and he grunts off to the side. You don't have to do the art to appreciate it necessarily. It's just like, you know, we don't have to know the Bible inside and out, backward and forwards, and have all these degrees in it to be able to find peace in it. Right. So take that and read it or.
One thing I did was I just focused in on one scripture or one worship song. And then eventually I started writing out the lyrics to that song. And then I started to hand letter the lyrics to that song. So I was just like, continuously putting those words in my mind. It's that whole, the more you look at it, the more you write it out, the more you memorize it. If it's decorating, that brings you peace, because crazily that's me. My husband jokes about how much I rearrange.
I may have rearranged our Ronald McDonald suite a couple times. Well, you're there for nine months. You might as well. Right? Just to get it out. We decorated the room for holidays. Like we did those things. And even that was just enough to take our brains off of life going on around us and call that place home. And then letting that be like your safe place and a place to land when you're going through those hard things
Amy: The way that you described it is very inviting. I'm a person that you can't force me to go to Hobby Lobby. I would just rather die. It overwhelms me. I don't know what to do with it. But, I'm a writer. So I like to write, but just even the idea that it doesn't have to be a big thing. It can be a very small thing, but the point of it is, I think is what you're saying, is that it focuses our mind on beauty and on God. . And it's way better, it probably less draining than scrolling on our phones. So I love that. And I know one thing you have shared with me before that you do is you have your beloved gel pins in your adult coloring books. And like that doesn't require you to like think about what am I gonna draw or what am I gonna write? It's just you pick a color and start coloring. And that I know that has been really important to you.
Jodie: Yeah, my daughter has gotten into it too, our middle child, and she was just telling me the other day, we've been going on walks in the morning with Chloe, and she just hangs in her chair, and she just loves to observe and watch. And so we took our coloring books and sat at a picnic table behind church, and she said, Mom, the reason I enjoy this so much is because I don't have to think about what to draw. I don't have to think about any of it. I just get to fill in the color. And I responded with...it feels like you get to have control over something when life feels so out of control. Like the picture's there, but we have control over what color I'm gonna put where. I lose control when the gel pen runs out, that's a thing. I'm like, oh, I need that color more. But it gives you that sense of, even if you can find the, like one thing my trauma counselor will say is, even if you can find the littlest thing that you can control, it'll help you to feel in control in such an out of control situation.
So one thing like with the coloring is it helps me to have control of what color am I gonna put where Helps me to feel the tiniest bit in control And that's what we just had came off of two back-to-back hospitals stays this spring And it's the first we've had hospital stays and like five years or more. I packed my gel pens and my coloring book and Every night when we would get back I would say in color and do that. Yeahand know that I, at the end of my day, I could have that to look forward to after such a long day in the hospital. I think too that moms, we don't often think about when we're heading into a hospital stay, and sometimes that's emergent or it's planned. You're like packing for your other kids, you're packing, you're taking care that we don't think we need to do something for us. And it's hard enough just to eat and drink and rest when you're in that kind of stage of a hospitalization.
Amy: But I love that you're encouraging moms to say, what can you pack? Can it be a magazine, a House Beautiful magazine? Can it be a book of poetry? Can it be adult coloring with gel pens? Just something that keeps our mind on the present. And I, you know, the hospital is exhausting. It's because, I think it's because we're just always. Oh yeah. Yeah, we're like leaning forward. Checking everything. You're always high alert. Right, right. So I just love that. And I think it also serves you in times when you're not at the hospital, right?It kind of feeds the fuel of creativity. So then you may be able to, even people who aren't say they aren't creative. I think we're all creative because we were made by a creative God. But even people who say they're aren't creative. So when they have more space, when things aren't emergent, they may be surprised at what wells up in them. All of a sudden they wanna write or all of a sudden they wanna paint a room or something that just fills that need.
Jodie: Yeah, well, like you were saying, like, you like decorating, but you can't step into Hobby Lobby. We'll take, I love the Magnolia magazine. Take that and sit and look at that. I joke in my head, I'll be like redesigning the hospital room. Where could this go? Where could that go? But yeah, something that I realized, like my counselor asked me, we knew a hospital stay might be coming up. And so she said, what are some things that you feel like you need near you to keep you calm? What are some like actual real life things, not just your phone and scrolling and stuff in the cloud. And I said, I need my Bible, I need my journal, and I need my pens and my coloring book. And I need a sketchbook. I mean, the list got kind of long. But she was like, pack that. If that's what, like make a list of those things, if that's what brings you calm, pack that. And then I always knew that even if I didn't use it or didn't have time to use it I knew it was nearby if I got that five-minute break from helping do care to the bedside or something. I knew it was there. So that's something that I think about now when we go on even just an appointment day, especially if it's, you know, cardiology appointment is one of the wild cards for us. That one always gives me anxiety. So it's like, what can I pack and take with me to keep me grounded that day so that I don't just get so caught up in sitting and scrolling and doing the anxious doom scrolling because then that's when comparison can come in, and you start to go, oh, we're sitting in a hospital today and this family's off on vacation, you know? So this is like having the creative things with me, my journal, a sketch pad, something like that, helps me to stay in our zone, in our lane. I hate that saying, but yeah, staying in our lane. And the situation he has us in for that moment. And then helping me to like bring myself down to the present because we're in a place that's always changing. So.we would get back up to Chloe's room and it'd be like, okay, I need a break after that chaos. So I'm gonna sit down with my coloring book for a while and I'm just gonna decompress for a moment because that was, that caught me off guard. So much of the hospital can catch you off guard. Be high alert, you don't know when there's gonna be a code called and it's gonna trigger something or just all the triggers. This having art before me literally also brings my eyes down in front of me so that I'm not just seeing and taking in.
all of the hospital life all the time, which helps from, like that's why when I do it at home, especially this routine I have of like coloring before bed now, like it makes me feel like I'm back home and in that safe spot.
Amy: You know, as kids, we used to color for hours and we rearranged Barbies, we had, all this stuff rearranged. I just think about like the comfort of coloring and doing things like that. Like I know for me, I will scroll when I'm exhausted. And because I don't want to pick up a book and read it. But the idea of coloring doesn't take a lot of brain space. I don't have to process words I can just pick. And so that's good. I think that's a really good recommendation, whether it's maybe it's knitting if you're a person that can knit without staring at it. Or whatever your thing is, there's gotta be something that as moms, not just for hospital stays, but like you said, for doctor's appointments, when you're sitting there forever.
It's a comfort, that's the word that stuck out to me. It's a way to look down at our hands and just always think about what has got asking me a hold of my hands today. And when I'm looking at Instagram, we're worried about tomorrow, I'm not holding what he's got in my hands today. And this is a really practical way to keep our eyes on something beautiful. I think the word creativity scares people because they're like, I don't know what to do, but it's really concrete and simple. And I think you said that you even, you would journal out and
color a page that had Bible verses on it, or highlight certain words and certain colors. It can be really anything. Because it's not for, it's just for us. It's just to keep us grounded. And I just, I love that. I love that.
Jodie: And it can be, like it doesn't have to be art. It can be, if you're a baker, if you love to bake, look at a recipe book, take a recipe book, like whatever it is that you find solacing and you can kind of be more calm-brained with. A lot of times it's doing something with your hands and your brain. So like knitting, you have to think through, or that's why I suck at knitting is because I don't count the rows. Yeah. And it just ends up like this squirrely-looking thing. I remember I learned that I like to bake. So a few years ago, my thing was like, I'm gonna bake if I feel restless because it gives my body something to be moving and doing.
And for baking, I really have to pay attention to the recipe. Just ask my husband to make sure that it's gonna turn out. I have to, but it makes you focus on something else. Right. While including your whole body. For some people it's exercise. Okay, so go walk outside around the hospital or something. So here's a funny story for you. You talked about like decorating is something that helps kind of ground you.and take your mind off stuff, probably because you're thinking about like, well, how will this look over there? And will this balance out? And is that the color scheme? I want to paint. So you're thinking about those things. So in our house, we have so much medical stuff that I work really hard to make it feel like a home and not a hospital. Even her bedroom, technically, it looks like a hospital room. You have all the syringes and you have the feed pump and you have the suction and you have the sat monitor and you have all the things, but I worked so hard to make it feel like a little girl's room and not like a hospital room. And so I've done that also in like our main front room. That's where we always are. She doesn't like to come to the basement. She has a little safety tent she plays in. I love to do like interior design in our house because A, it gives me a sense of control. I can put that couch where I want to kind of thing. B, it kind of grounds us into this is our home and this is a safe space.
My kids wouldn't, the room I'm in used to be their playroom and we had supplies in here. And then we didn't know until a couple years ago when they could finally put words to it why they never played in here. And it was because all of the equipment and supplies made them think of the hospital because they'd walk past, you know, they'd have like in the halls the storage carts that they'd come load the rooms with. They finally were able to voice that and we're like, oh, so we bought white cabinets with closed doors and we put her supplies in there now.
The kids actually have told me before that they get anxious when the house is too clean because it makes them feel like a sterile hospital. How interesting. Or the Ronald McDonald house, how everything's spotless because you have kiddos there for treatments and it has to be dustless and everything. That was a huge awakening for me because I had to be like, oh, I have to allow them to have some of their clutter in here because that's what makes it feel like home to them. She has enough equipment that we really have to think through. how is all the furniture gonna fit? How's the table gonna fit? We brought the table, we have a sunken in dining room and it's just not feasible with her. We have to carry her everywhere. She's nine years, but she's, she bumps scoots, but otherwise like she's immobile in terms of she can't just walk around. So we got creative when we brought the dining room table up into the front living room area. So the story I was gonna tell you was I have this one like gothic looking mirror that I got from Marshall's And when I got it, there was two of them, and I'm like, oh, you know, I can only really afford the one, and one will be fine. And I always regretted not getting the double ones and putting them side by side. I was at Hobby Lobby, and I saw this mirror there again. And I was like, oh, the way we have the cabinets now in the front room, I wanna have them side by side so that it looks more symmetrical. And I went back to the store, and this was only like 20 minutes later, and it was gone. And I was like, oh man, and I asked a lady,
And she goes, oh, you know, I think we just, the last one just got sold or something. I'm like, oh man, really? I've been waiting a year to get that one. She's like, yeah, they go fast. So then I'm walking down a different aisle and I spy the mirror and it's in someone else's cart. But that lady, that family had kids that were crashing and I was like, oh, are they gonna succeed in their mission to get through checkout before the kids crash? And so I kind of hung around. I hung around an aisle like.and I go over to where they were and she had taken the frame out of the car and put it in the toy aisle. And I was like, it's available now. So I put it in my cart. So yeah, I have my two mirrors now that I like, but it's like, you just put this little effort into your home and it makes it feel more like your space because you spend so much time in the hospital, so much time looking at the ugly geometric pattern that's on the walls that every hospital has, you spend time.you have to make sure that you have a space. Your environment is, especially for medically fragile families who stay home a lot, it's okay to put that time and effort and energy into what it looks like to make your brain feel calm, to make the kids feel like it's their home space.
Amy: I love that, I love that. And I think sometimes people go, oh, it's so much work, but no, it's worth it to get a space that you feel at rest in. So I think that's it. So as we kind of wrap up here, I wanna ask you two more questions.
Can you talk just a tiny bit about, you have a children's book. I do. And you have another book. So will you talk a little bit about that?
Jodie: Yeah, I actually have a couple more too. One of them was I designed a coloring book because I learned that just sketching and drawing was something that grounded me. And I thought, okay, if this grounds me, maybe it'll ground the next mom that's sitting in the NICU kind of things. The other one is, When God Made You and it's-a poem based book, but it's based off of Psalm 139. I wrote it because my kids at that age, when Chloe was a newborn, they were two and three or three and four, were asking so many questions. Why does she have this tube in her belly? Why does she have this thing in her neck to help her breathe? So I wrote it on a kid's level to help answer the basic questions, so just to help the kids understand. And now it's become a tool as they've gotten older.it's become a tool that like people at church, their little kids might ask and I can reference this book to them then and be like, this explains it on their level because it is so hard to in two minutes, wrap up and explain and answer questions when you're doing your thing and you don't always wanna be stopped and asked the same questions. So yeah, that one was the kids when I wrote for that. The memoir style is called Finding Thanks and it's my expectations of entering motherhood versus the reality of entering motherhood. I didn't know anyone growing up that had disabilities or special needs or anything like that. So this world was so new to me and I had never expected it. And I think it just showed me like how much my expectations were so ingrained in me and I wasn't open to what God wanted to do. And yet he equips us and he puts us here. It's my journey of learning to accept that and learning to find, literally find things. Like I had to work towards gratitude to be able to see that God was doing something through this.
Amy: Yeah, for our listeners, we will put links to all this in the show notes so you can find Jodi's books. They are lovely, so make sure that you check those out. So we're gonna close out with you, if you're prepared to do a reading for us.. if you wanna set this up, because we talked about this yesterday, we were messaging you back and forth that
This was an actual in real life way that you use creativity to calm your nervous system and calm your heart. So if you wanna set up that and then read us out, and before you read us out, just thank you so much for being here. I have enjoyed this conversation so much.
Jodie:Yeah, well, it's a gift to get to do this. What I'll read in the background of it, and just to say like sometimes creativity is very much a personal thing first, and maybe always some creativity is born out of places we don't expect.
It's not just sitting down at the table and saying, okay, I'm gonna pull up this picture on Pinterest, I'm gonna paint those flowers. Sometimes it's just kind of born out of a place we don't expect it to come from, and this is one of those places. I do trauma counseling, and we do what's called EMDR, a type of reprocessing to help reprocess the hard memories, and you have to really work first at learning coping skills so that when you do reprocess, reprocess a hard memory,you know how to bring yourself back out of it and get grounded back into today, into the present. And so my counselor was like, what's your safe space? And I couldn't think of anything. She's like, come up with it. Like it can be anything you want. And so one thing I thought of was just an island that's just me. There's nothing there can hurt me or harm me. I have years of past trauma too, not just Chloe. And so I was like, where would I feel the safest? And it was alone on an island. no snakes on my island.
Amy: Amen. As the Lord intended.
Jodie: Yes. Yes, exactly. Move to Ireland. So I came up with this idea for an island. And so I would try to picture that as I was coming out of an EMDR session, and it just wasn't quite working. And I told her that. And I decided to write out a creative writing piece. I guess you might call it prose. But how could I weave creative writing that would get my mind hooked on something now in the present that could help me be still. Yeah, just help me to not be caught up in those memories I had just talked about. And so I wrote out the piece and we paired it together and she would read it to me at the end of a session and I would picture this painting that I ended up doing of a beach. At one point I was like, I need this recorded so I can just listen to it. Cause she was like, have it on your phone, read it when you're anxious kind of thing.
And I had mentioned that to my husband and he started reading it in the voice of Kermit. I'm like, this is not gonna work. And then yes, it did. And then he did it in the voice of Gru. And so even now, like if I'm kind of anxious, he's like, have you done your reading? And he'll start to read it in the voice of Gru. And I'm like, I can't do that. So it at least brings laughter and it grounds me. All that to say the idea, and I've written a few more of these since then, the magazine that just published itOur Story magazine, and this one is called, we just called it a summer reflection.
You're at the beach, a private island. No one is here but you, and you are safe. Everything is okay. Feel your feet sink into the white sand, the warmth of the grains over the tops of your feet in between your toes. You lift a handful of sand and let it slowly fall back from the palm of your hand onto the ground, the calm breeze blowing the grains back down.
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God, how vast is the sum of them. If I would count them, they are more than the grains of sand. I awake and I am still with you.( Psalm 139.) The crystal clear turquoise water gently sweeps up and over your feet, past your calves. Then the low tide is gently pulled back into the depths. Again, the blue water washes up and back, up and back, up and back.
You are safe as it washes over you. The warmth of the sun is on your back and shoulders. Feel its heat radiating out, blanketing your skin. The warm breeze picks up. It brushes your arms, your hands, your legs. Feel the wind carry the loose strands of hair aimlessly around your face. The palm tree above you sways in the same breeze. Its long leaves reaching out over the water as it bows low to touch the sea.You hear the sound of the ocean lapping at the edge of the sand, the small waves continuing their cycles back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. You look up past the edge of the waves and see the light on the teal water glistening, catching the sun and dancing like diamonds across the sea. White lines lay calmly over the water's surface, like delicate lace, changing, shifting, moving with the motion of the water, then dipping under the waves.
Feel the soothing water still gathering at your feet. You stand and wade into its warmth, one slow step at a time, until it's up to your waist. The ocean pulls and sways around your waist as you extend your hands out to float on the surface. You feel the water surrounding you and the sun's heat still on your neck. You breathe in the salty air. The clear water begins to deepen into teal, then turquoise, then almost emerald green.
The waves continue to pull, but you stand firm. Fee planted safely in the sand at the bottom of the sea. You watch the waves curl up and splash gently over, pushing the ocean swell to the shore and back again. To the shore and back again, gently shifting around your body. To the shore and back again, the Sea of Teal expands all the way to the horizon and nothing else in its waters but you.
back and forth in its embrace. You rule over the surging sea. When its waves mount up, you still them.( Psalm 89.) Slowly you wade back to the shore, sitting to face the blue ocean. The white lace pattern still rests on the water's surface as the light catches the sun, like glistening diamonds, and continues dancing along the water's edge. The water laps back and forth over your feet, and as they settle into the white, warm sand,
The sun dries your back. The gentle waves continue roaming back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. He stalled the storm to a whisper. The waves of the sea were hushed.( Psalm 107).