Miracles on the Shore

Caswell Beach, at the Southeastern tip of North Carolina, holds many amazing memories for me. When I was an undergrad student in biology, we used Caswell as a base for field work in zoology in the Fall, after all the campers had cleared out, probably about this time of year or a little later.  We would spend entire days up to our necks in lagoons and swamps and ocean water, catching fish and invertebrates in seines.  If we were lucky, there'd be the occasional gator or snake to chase after, too.  I saw my one and only wild coral snake on Caswell Beach--so be careful walking after dark!  In later years, while doing youth ministry, I took groups of kids there several years, and I have amazing memories of squatting out on the dunes with kids pouring their hearts out to Jesus and not even caring that the mosquitoes were eating us alive.  I got stuck in quicksand twice (out of the three times it's happened to me...so far!) on Caswell Beach (beware the cove at the far end of the island, where the inlet of the waterway slips up alongside what appears to be the gentlest, sandiest beach on the island!).  The buddy with whom I shared my first quicksand experience is gone now, having died at far too young an age.  But of all the amazing times I saw God at Caswell, the most amazing by far was a night when we were out casting surf nets for jellyfish.  We were wading in the edge of the rising tide well after dark, and we started seeing something that looked like a faint, greenish glow a few feet out where the island's shelf drops off sharply--just dim enough that it could have been imaginary, and yet we all felt we'd seen something.  Suddenly, a whole crew of twenty-something guys were no longer worried about sounding cool or what the girls were doing or the beer smuggled onto the Baptist-owned compound from the local convenience store--suddenly, the whole lot of us were caught up in the grip of the passion for life that had made us aspiring zoologists in the first place (and which later drew me to pastoral ministry).  Before we even consciously recognized it, all of us were plunging headlong into the deep surf, fumbling with the cast nets, splashing and cursing and completely driven by pure, unstoppable fascination and the desire to discover.  Within moments, one of us--who knows which, because we only cared about this amazing gift of God's
ocean--stood cupping in his hands a few ounces of seawater and something soft as an eggwhite
and complex and other-worldly as if it had just fallen from a passing Martian spacecraft.  The transleucent, pulsing bag, about the size of a Kiwi fruit, was covered in rows of undulating tentacles, all moving in perfect rhythm, and it gave off a greenish glow like a million-mile-distant star as it swam, cupped in the hands of a student who suddenly felt like the first man to walk on the moon.  It turned out to be an adult ctenophoran, a group of invertebrates only distantly related to the jellyfish they closely resemble.  In my life, I have encountered God in churches and lumber-yards; in nursing homes and third-world slums; in streets and subways and sawdust-strewn aisles under a brush arbor, but I can honestly say I have never been more awed
by His power than in that moment, standing knee-deep in an Autumn surf.  Revelation of the Divine is all around us.  The very rocks and trees cry out the glory of God Almighty.  Take time today to listen to their song and see God's handiwork in even the lowliest of creatures.  May God bless your own journey of discovery as He has mine!