I am so glad to have this Monday off. I am jet-lagged, sunburned, knocked up, and pissed off (for reasons I’m not free to discuss right now; but in a total non sequitur, doesn’t Horrible Bosses look like an excellent movie?). I need a vacation to recover from our vacation, but I will take this one day and run with it, thank you very much. I am enjoying a day of relative silence, absent of people like the guy at baggage claim yesterday who feel the need to loudly narrate everything surrounding them (“Is that our bag? No? No, that’s not ours. That one has a red ribbon on the handle. Look at that bag! Leopard-print! Guess it’s not hard to recognize that in a crowd! Hey, I thought the economy was bad. Can’t tell it by how many people are traveling, HAR HAR HAR! There’s our bag. Nope, it’s not.”). I am looking forward to a day of reflection on what really matters (to that end, I am catching up on all the blogs I missed reading last week, including God’s, as well as flexing my own rusty thinking and writing muscles). I am hoping for a day of rehydrating my body, restocking the kitchen, and eating healthy(er). I am anticipating a day of suiting up for battle out there in the world, of letting people know (with as much grace as I can muster) that if they mess with the bull, they will get the horns. And what happens if you bring a knife to a gun fight. Excuse the bellicosity, which I will blame on exhaustion and hormones. This time.

The Husband and I stayed in five hotels over the course of eight nights, and ventured into the ocean twice in nine days. This, as Whitney sang, is not right, but it’s okay. It’s just that (and I may have mentioned this before) for me, a vacation is not complete unless I return with sand in my bag, multiple books read, and several bottles of wine killed. (That last one, for obvious reasons, does not apply this summer–but I did have my first few sips of California red since before the stick showed two lines and It. Was. Glorious. Like coming home from a tour of duty.) If there is a beach nearby, I want to be on it, staring at the water when I’m not riding the waves, falling asleep at night to the rhythm of the tide and feeling its ebb and flow from my pillow. Maybe it’s because Californians are used to the water being there that they don’t feel a sense of urgency to constantly be immersed in it, much like I didn’t feel compelled to complete my New York Tourist Checklist until the month I was moving. Or maybe it’s because the Pacific is just so damn cold. But in my occasionally-humble opinion, there is only one group of people who appear to spend enough time in the sea.

Surfers.

I’ve always wanted to learn to surf–to know the view of the shore from the top of a wave–but after spending some time watching the experts at Carlsbad Beach, I began to realize that, like most things in life, this activity is so much more difficult than it appears. But from my perch on the shore next to TH, I watched a surfer who remained upright for every wave she mounted, and seemed to choose the moment she would return to the water, never coming all the way to shore and never crashing in a spray of salt (or being toppled by a gruesome wave and re-engaging the vertical position just in time to realize a boob is hanging out–not that I would know how that feels.) I saw her glide and skim her way around each wave’s crest, expertly maneuvering her way around the top of the water like she was made to do it. Like it was easy. Like it was fun. TH and I agreed that what would be best is if we could go straight from our present, complete inability to surf to that level of effortlessness. Because it’s only fun when you don’t spend all your time trying.

That was when God reminded me that he’s everywhere, even California (though I’m not sure about certain parts of Hollywood). And that he was showing me a picture of what life looks like when perfect trust and grace meet.

Effortless. How much time and energy have I spent trying to look that way? How many opportunities do I miss to be still and just enjoy the view? To skim above the surface of life’s waves rather than constantly place myself, through worrying and fear, at their mercy? To trust what’s never failed me? To let grace hold me up and carry me?

To find out how it feels–and looks–to fly.