Sometimes I wonder if any of us are cut out for the lives we lead. –Rebecca Wells, Little Altars Everywhere

I always find my way back to the beach.

I grew up on these shores, the bottom of Alabama and the panhandle of Florida, the Gulf water chasing me into the sand then enveloping me into its warmth, rocking me into its rhythm. I remember late nights on my grandparents’ balcony, early mornings in youth group cabins, waning afternoons at the sand bar with red Solo cups, varying amounts of fitting in and feeling adrift, and it’s only in looking back that I know how unmoored I was. How the waves, always returning, loosened the grip of loneliness and made me feel a part of something bigger. The way New York and its skyline did. The way my family does.

But sometimes you can feel like you’re drowning in something bigger.

It’s easy to forget in the day-to-dryness of it, that we weren’t here first. That the something bigger isn’t me, isn’t my plan or my expectations or my lists. The Husband and I take a night for ourselves, and we head east toward my promised land: the shore where we were married; the simplicity of sand, sun, and salt. I wonder, once we hit construction and have to turn around to find our way back, whose idea it first was to build this road. Two numbers and a letter that have become a resting place, a home, a meeting point. 30A. It’s on bumper stickers now, but there was a time when trucks were just paving it, before towns were named or restaurants built, when it was just hot asphalt waiting to be more.

It had to be built up–ripped dirt and liquid rock looking more like a tearing down–before it could ever become.

We pass a sign in front of a church, and these marquees usually make me groan, but I read this one–Same God, same plan–and feel the gentle reminder, that our routes are a divine mixture of chosen and ordained.

I arrived down here frayed and jittery; six hours in the car with two little ones will do that, not to mention nearly four years of parenthood. I had felt like I was drowning, which is less alarming and maybe a little too accepted when it’s become a rhythmic and familiar thing, a sensation returned to every so often thanks to tiredness and hormones and…just life. There are herbs and counselors and prayers and other counteracting agents. And then sometimes you just need a vacation. This one had arrived at exactly the right time–funny how that happens–the days and my temper feeling shorter, the monotony making me restless. The weight of two young boys–pushing them up hills in a stroller, throwing them into a cart at Target, explaining things over and over–can leave one breathless. The wonderful weight of it all feeling overbearing, the guilt from that feeling threatening to undo me.

I needed some air. Sea air.

The repetition involved in raising young kids–especially one who is struggling to talk and deals with motor planning issues, therefore needs that repetition in a way most of us will never understand–can be painful. Annoying. Exhausting. Unless, of course, you’re Mother Teresa reincarnated, in which case I have two things to say: 1) What the hell are you doing on my blog? and 2) No you’re not. Even Ma T would have lost it, I think, some days with some diapers. I find that it’s the constant doing over and over again that drives me to the brink of insanity most days. Then I realize that it’s how Little Brother and TK grow and learn. And that, for TK, it’s even more: like the rhythmic waves on the shore, it loosens his anxiety, dilutes it and even washes some away. It’s a rhythm that brings assurance. It calms and steadies him.

Could it do the same for me?

While we were away, I walked out on the dock one morning after a run. The bay was quiet and smooth, and I turned to walk home toward the sun. I considered that I’ve had it all wrong for so long: that the wooden boards nailed together beneath me are not, in fact, a gangplank leading to my death. But that they could be a pier leading to the kind of grace that walks on water, beckoning me out for a spin. Because there’s this, that Francis Frangipane said: “Rescue is the constant pattern of God’s activity.” There were so many (let’s not kid ourselves–ARE so many) situations I looked around at and then looked up from, awaiting my airlift out, and nothing happened. Happens. Maybe because everything around me is my rescue. I think about the repetitive nature of grace, all the works of it that begin with the “re” prefix, the doing over and over again: rescue. Re-creation. Redemption. All of it, reenactments of the grace that beget us all.

Grace never just happens once.

And this one: reconciliation. In The Rabbi’s Heartbeat, Brennan Manning slays me yet again:

Those who wear bulletproof vests to protect themselves from failure, shipwreck, and heartbreak will never know what love is. The unwounded life bears no resemblance to the Rabbi…The reconciled heart says that everything that has happened to me had to happen to make me who I am–without exception.

I’m being reconciled: to this life, this building-up, this over-and-over-ness of grace that makes me learn it by heart. The first time I took TK to horse therapy, my map told me to go a route that it has never repeated. But I’ve kept going that way, because it leads by a gleaming body of water. TK and I stare out the window at it. Sadly, it’s not a bay or ocean, but a water treatment plant. Still–it’ll do for now. We gaze in silence at the still water for the five seconds we get it each week from our windows, where it waits for us and our rhythmic return, this beach we always come back to.