Picking up seashells

James 1:6  "But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering.  For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed." KJV

Picking up seashells has always been a favorite pastime when I go to the beach.  My family will tell you that I have to bring home shells on each visit to the seashore.  Almost every room in my house has a container of broken shells.  I have a few complete white sand dollars I gathered on one rare day when riding in friend's boat, and we ran up on a sandbar.  I have to check out souvenir shops for the colorful, complete shells just because every now and then I want to think I have something 'perfect'.

Broken shells are mostly all I pick up because by the time they reach the shore, they have been pounded by the rocks and waves, and shells intact are hard to find.  Yet there is so much beauty in those broken shells.  It may be the color, the shape, the spiral insides showing where the outside of the shell has been pounded and broken, or the rare piece of God's creation like the piece of coral shaped like an 'A' that a friend kindly handed over to me for my daughter Anna.  Tiny auger shells no bigger than the fine point of a Sharpie marker are housed in a Canadian maple syrup bottle shaped like a leaf.  Olives, the state shell of South Carolina, Atlantic scallop shells detached from their other half, and broken conchs and channeled whelks showing their intricate insides are some shells I've brought from the 'Down East' shores of North Carolina.

One thing I've realized is that each day brings a whole new assortment of seashells.  I get excited just thinking about what I might find on a shore whose whole surface has changed from the day before.

Each day I get another chance to pick up the pieces of my life and start anew.  God takes me just as I am and loves me no matter how much I have been 'beaten by the waves'.  I had rather have a broken shell over a perfect one any day because it reminds me of the struggles I go through, the chances I get to start all over, and the way God works in His time to perfect me and teach me patience, trust, and faith.  In other words, He often has to break me to perfect me.  After all, I may wait a long time to find a perfect shell, it there is any such thing!

The outside of a 'perfect' shell may be beautiful, and I may even look fine on a given day, but what matters to God is what's inside of me...how I react to struggles, how I realize I'm not perfect and often fail, and how I show Christ to a hurting world. 

Quigley has never been to the beach, but I can see him now...smelling the loam that's washed up, running into the water and chasing a dangerous jellyfish, coming back with whiskers full of sand, and perhaps trying to devour shells.  It would be a job keeping up with him in that situation, but I'd still like to give him the chance to enjoy that freedom at least for one day.