Sand Castles

My family has been to many beaches.  We left our footprints in the sand in Santa Monica, Oxnard, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Malibu, Huntington Beach, Pismo Beach, Waikiki, Kailua Beach (my favorite one in Hawaii!), and Cancun, just to name a few.  My kids built sand castles in most of them.  They would invariably find a spot on the beach that was well below the tide line and within a couple of feet of the lapping waves, start digging trenches and pile mounds of sand as a fortress against the invading waters.  By the time the fortress reached about a foot in height, a large wave would come up and wash up a good chunk of their work, and the kids would shriek in delight, dig harder and put up more reinforcements against upcoming surges of seawater.  This would last for about an hour, and by the time we were ready to leave the beach, the sand castle was nowhere to be found, reclaimed by the sea.

The beach is like God's dry erase board or Etch-a-Sketch.  No matter what's on it, it eventually gets wiped clean.

I stood in front of the television at a local McDonald's restaurant one morning in March 2011, with my Egg McMuffin in hand and my eyes transfixed on images of the devastating tsunami that ravaged the Japanese coast near Sendai.  Colossal man-made structures were literally tossed around in the water like bathtub toys, and entire villages literally disappeared once the water receded.  Tens of thousands of lives were lost or forever changed in an instant.

They were wiped clean, like sand castles below the tide line.

We recently took a family vacation in Nashville, Tennessee, and spent many days enjoying barbeque, eating deep-fried foods, and listening to wonderful live music.  We also spent some time visiting a replica of the Greek Parthenon, which is now a museum.  The replica was quite a beautiful and imposing structure, and demonstrated how it might have looked like in the Acropolis two thousand years ago.  In comparison, the actual Parthenon in Greece has only relatively skeletal remains, and it will continue to erode over time.  How will it look like in, say, two thousand more years?

It is good to turn our eyes toward things eternal, for all of our striving on earth will eventually be wiped clean.

"All people are like grass,
and all their glory is like the flowers of the field;
the grass withers and the flowers fall,
but the glory of the Lord endures forever."
(1 Peter 1:24-25)