testimony

This is why God moved me to the edges of Puget Sound. I needed the waves I never knew existed.

My faith is the tide with seasons of high and low—belief and unbelief. I find that I am the conch on the shore, listening to the echoing within and thinking the waves are my own doing, not reflective of the real waves without. My childhood baptism was a mist: the leftover spray of the water after a steep splash against the true, strong rocks before me.

I am no one. I am not set on solid ground but am sinking and rising in the bubbling sand, pushed and nudged by crabs in low tide. The ticking of their pointed arms, the empty timelessness of dry periods: no god in sight.

But the tide always comes back. Before long, I again find myself in the search. I begin to doubt that I may be the sole source of the whooshing waves. Slowly, the water tickles the edges of the shell in brief breaths of salty wet. I seek. I seek the next breath, the next stain of salt, until finally, it inundates me in high tide, the water rolling over me in full glee. Sometimes it lasts, twirling me about in its flow, sending me deeper in the pull.

It may stay. It may hold me in the depths, or even a shallow tide pool, for weeks, months. I can feel it, the pale softening of my hard exterior, the search becoming a change; the change becoming my life.

Yet it never seems to fully last. My faith in the tides, that they will come again, is just true to the former: surely, they will sink back into the sea. I only wonder: once my shell is eroded all to sand, will I be the sun-burnt beach, wishing for the tide, or will I be the ocean floor, spinning in the cool light of the sun’s reflection on the water’s life?