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Holden Beach: Day #2

So it rained today.  Not the kind of weather one hopes for at the beach.  In the morning it was simply grey, but we had heard the forecast and knew what the clouds were bringing later that day.  Since it was our first full day, we all went down to the beach, sun or no sun.  As the girls laid out their towels and stretched out, their sunning positions were almost laughable.  Myself and a few others opted to play in the waves; Thomas taught Cynthia how to bodysurf since it was her very first time in the ocean.  She and I weren't very good at it, and the pre-storm waves were pretty forceful.  As we got sucked and dragged and crashed against, battered by the waves and currents, this is what it felt like:


It was brutal fun.  And as we were out in the surf, we figured out why they were so many fisherman lining the beach.  Many many times as a large wave would swell, just before the crest would break we could clearly see entire schools of two-inch long fish, which we later learned are called blue fish, caught up together in the wave.  Sometimes their little heads would poke out of the water and at one point I went into a screeching panic because 3 of them leapt fully out of the water and ran into my shoulder, my thigh and my knee.  No wonder I saw pelicans swoop into the ocean several times - they were probably feasting.




After an hour, I reached my limit on how much salt water I could stand being forced down my nose, so I retreated to my too-tiny beach towel.  I ripped through a book I had just ordered online as Emily laid on the towel next to me, studying for her homechurch teaching next week.  Most of our group stayed out in the water a little while longer, but the rain had finally arrived.  We all trudged back under a timid drizzle and went our separate ways preparing lunch.  As I left the boys' house with Brandon, the smells of garlic and chicken following me out, I wished I had something better than macaroni and cheese waiting for me at the house.  

The rain forced everyone into indoor activities, and laptops sprang up like mushrooms.  Back at the girls' house, I went about cooking my macaroni and cheese, adding some frozen broccoli for nutrition's sake.  The kitchen was full of loud women Brandon isn't used to talking to on a normal basis, so he (surprisingly) turned to the pile of packets on the counter.  For the next hour, he was sucked in - he couldn't even looked up when I passed him the bowl with his half of the meal.  I read quietly next to him, amazed for several reasons that this was happening and praying it would keep on as long as possible.

Every year on the beach trip, a particular reading is given out to all the college homechurches, typically divided out into one reading for every day that we're here.  Then over breakfast, each individual house will read and discuss the packet together and pray at the end.  The topics and selections vary from year to year, and are always sent to the homechurch leaders a week before we leave.  This year when the leaders received the selection, they thought the email was a joke - until they saw that it came with discussion questions.  The co-head pastor of Xenos and leader of our college group is Dennis McCallum; if you do a search for him on Amazon, you'll find that he's been published several times in non-fiction theological subjects and that he's brilliant.  But there is this one fiction attempt of his that's infamous in the college group, because it's little more than a poorly-disguised theology book.  Most I know who've started "The Summons" haven't been able to finish it.  And for at least four of the days here we were given reading selections from that book.

So here it was, in a pile on the corner of our countertop, and Brandon began to read it.  Brandon, who has turned down several book suggestions because "I just don't read", treated the handout like a page-turner thriller for more than an hour.  Because of his past, Brandon has been struggling for the past year-and-a-half to figure out his beliefs, and here he was drawn to this infamous book.  In my head, I went between praying for him to continue reading and lauding praise on Dennis and his almost-fiction book.  That hour of reading turned into an hour-long conversation on the porch between Brandon and I, saying that he identified with the main character for several reasons and better revealed more of his barriers.

Another tradition at the beach that has grown over the past couple years is themed happy hours.  As in, happy hours with alcohol, yes.  The Lord has given wine to gladden the heart of men, so we intend to make merry.  Every day is a different theme - for example, Saturday was Super Spandex Saturday, but I think it was poorly attended because of people recouperating from the drive.  Today, Sunday, was Soulful Sunday, previously called "Thick Asses, Big Glasses".  Before Claire left she had on sequined snakeskin-patterned spandex pants and brightest red lipstick.  These boys...well they went like this.  And we don't exactly know why.

After the happy hour crowd cleared out for the mile-long walk to the party, the house was fairly quiet.  But a little while later, Daina came back to the house with Pat, both of them as excited as I was about walking a mile in the rain both ways to happy hour.  So after some digging in the closet, we found a 750-piece puzzle of New York's Time Square, one with lots of words on it to make it easier, to occupy our rainy evening.  For the next three hours, we pored over it together as Daina put on cd after good cd in the background.  Emily sat on the couch knitting the neck of her sweater and egging on Pat and Daina's good-natured bickering.  Certain chunk of the puzzle took on identities, such as "ugly sweater lady", "the leather jacket lady", and a small elusive section Pat dubbed "cleavage lady".






A little while after starting the puzzle, there was a knock at the door and Dave came in all out of breath, excited to show me something.  And there in his hand, still very much alive, was a beautiful purple shell.  He had run all the way from the beach where he found it just to show it me, and I loved him a little more for that.  He offered trying to eat the mussel so we could save the perfect shell, but I said I had plenty of shells already and I'd rather this little guy continue living.  Dave agreed.  He gave me a kiss and jogged back to the shore. Later I heard that he had caught some of the fish that we had previously seen in the waves; all the ones he caught were too small, but a neighboring fisherman gave him a couple of extra ones.  So he gutted them and ate them, fresh from the ocean.  He asked me to look up simple blue fish recipes for when he catches more later this week.


 We continued to work long and hard on the puzzle, with the help of Andrew/Darkness, to put the last impossible pieces in.  Only to find that we were missing One. Damn. Piece.



I found the piece an hour after everyone left on Pat's side of the table.  There has never been a more anti-climactic placement of the last piece of the puzzle, which upset me a little bit.

A little while later a few straggler boys came in from the rain to kill some time, because a poker game with boys from the Diesel homechurch was dominating their house.  Because one of our Kodiak girls is about to marry one of their Diesel boys, and it'd be no good for them to stay in separate homechurches, Luke is coming to our homechurch to be a Kodiak.  And not only that, but he's bringing a few other Diesels to come merge with us.  So the Diesel boys played poker with our Kodiak boys to start getting to know each other and get ready to become one group.  Excitement, change and growth.

Comments

Katie said…
im so glad your doing this heather, i feel like i know whats going on even though im hear in dreary old columbus! sounds like fun, exciting about brandon!

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