This year’s girls’ trip to Surfside Beach was more relaxed than some years have been. This was the fourth year that Becky Rangel and I have been and the third year that Kandy has been able to join us. We left on Sunday, July 28 (I’d been home from Hindman one day), and returned on Wednesday, July 31. It’s a long drive for three days, but we try to make the most of it.
My heart was heavy going into this trip. Had Kandy and Becky known each other better and had transportation to get there, I probably would have bowed out of the trip altogether. I really felt the need and desire to be at home and to begin the mourning process for my mother-in-law who passed away unexpectedly on July 18. I wanted and needed to be with my husband. But there I was, at Surfside Beach, trying to make the best of things.
I won’t try to recap all we did. We did the usual beach-y things – we ate out; we looked for shells; we went in the water some; we stayed in the sun too long. We did something a little unusual – we went to the Piggly Wiggly one evening so I could buy some Piggy Wiggly gear after we talked about it the previous week at Hindman.
But I also watched the sunrise each morning. The first morning, I cheated and just watched it from the balcony. It was pretty, but I missed the view from the sand. So the second day, I got up early and went down by myself and watched the sun as it tried to make its way through several layers of clouds. It was frustrating. The glorious voyage skyward I’d witnessed the day before was stifled. There were still pretty colors, but it just couldn’t seem to break free, couldn’t get its shine on. And that’s when it hit me. If the SUN has problems getting out of bed some days, if the SUN has obstacles it has to overcome in order to get on with what it has to do, then, by golly, it’s okay if WE have those days, too. We all have to climb embankments of clouds of some sort in life. It’s hard. It’s tedious. It takes all we have and sometimes, it isn’t as pretty as we want it to be. But it’s possible. It’s do-able. We just have to keep working on it.
On the third day, there were two major layers of clouds before the skies were clear, with a break between. The sun finally made it over one section and made a glorious spectacle of itself, but then it had to climb over that next layer. Further evidence that we can do our best to shine where we can, then climb when we need to, so we can shine again. Doing what we have to do, so we can do what we need to do.
That was my big takeaway from the beach this year. Even the sun has obstacles to overcome; so why should I expect any less than that in my own life? I shouldn’t. I should just be ready to adjust my attitude and dig in, to do what I can to rise above whatever stands in my way of ascending to what I know I can achieve, knowing there’s something beautiful in every part of what I do.
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