Late afternoon on Sunday my husband and I took a walk to the beach. The wind was a little brisk, especially when we were near the water and the waves were huge and crashing. At the end of our walk we turned to walk up the beach path to go home. We both stopped and looked at the angle of the sand. “Hey, isn’t this path a lot steeper and higher than it was last summer?” I said.
He said, “I’ll say. Standing at the top of the path we’re taller than that cottage. We were never that high above that roof.” I agreed. Then we ambled on toward home.
Last fall, before the storms of winter hit, I thought I was negotiating this same path quite well. I didn’t take the winter storms into account. Just as I was feeling I could put my feet in other peoples’ footsteps and practically sprint up that path, in came the January storms changing the path and the shoreline. The jetty is completely buried and you can’t even tell there were rocks taller than me there in September. Part of the beach is gouged out, forming tidal pools 1-2 feet deep, decidedly different than it looked just 6 months ago.
When the unplanned storms of life wreak havoc, I turn around and stare up at that beach path thinking, how did that happen? My husband and I just look at each other in much the same way did on that walk, and say, “Well, we have two choices. We can just stand down here on the bottom of the path and complain how much steeper it is this year, or, we can join hands and climb the hill together.”
The song, “Let Us Climb the Hill Together” by Paul Clark was our wedding song. I still carry it on my iPod. It brings me to tears when it takes me by surprise in a playlist. Through the years we have always leaned on it when the path got steep. After sitting and discussing our child, financial, and work woes, one of us always says “We’re still climbing that hill together.” Then we laugh.
It takes quite a song to bring a relationship across thirty six years and still enable us to sit back and laugh in the face of difficulty. This song resonates in the strength of a relationship that doesn’t care how high the beach path gets. I remember this song conveying the seriousness of our commitment that day to each other and God. The most beautifully written line of the song occurs just before the end:
“In times of trial when things are hard to see, will you stand by me?
With love, it can heal the pain so let it rain…on the roof of my soul…there is no hole…that love can’t fill…so let us climb the hill together…”
I love the words “let it rain on the roof of my soul””. I always picture us huddled under a tarp on the beach in a storm, protected. In “times of trial, when things are hard to see” it’s helpful to have a visual.
Life, like the beach path will always be exposed to storms that change the terrain. I learned a long time ago it will never be flat and settled and easy to navigate. I learned to anticipate a little steeper path each time we go to climb it. The time spent resting at the top is brief. The view is amazing, especially when I look back and see how far we’ve climbed. But we can’t stay on top of the beach path. We have to walk back home.
And so, as another day goes by, once again the beach path speaks, and…I have written.
LINDA—-BEAUTIFUL!
JOAN
Thank goodness the path is never the same twice. I’m glad for the shifting winds and the come and go of the bits and pieces of life. Makes it all the more interesting… sometimes exciting, sometimes challenging… but never boring. Here’s to the changes in life. They prove us worthy!
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