Sand

I'm taking a vacation with my family at Cape Hatteras, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and I was recognizing the significance of sand, in the circumstance of Go promising Abraham that his descendants would be more abundant than the grains of sand on the earth. Phew. That's uncomfortable.

I say uncomfortable because with the beach comes sand, sand in your hair, sand on your feet, sand in every crevice of your body. And for those of us with more crevices, this gets a little unreasonable to have to rinse off every time we come back to the campsite from the beach. It gets a little annoying, you know what I'm saying?

Th point is, those little Israelites were going to prosper, and there was nothing that was stopping them. They weaseled there way into a lot of good deals, and out of bad deals because they were prosperous (and sometimes into bad deals, like slavery) But that didn't stop them. They still burrowed their way into those little nooks and crannies.

The truth is, we annoy God sometimes, like sand sometimes annoys me at the beach. But the great thing to notice is that sand is moldable. God can form sand into something beautiful--sandcastles, sculptures, and even glass. Whenever people walk through sand, they imprint their foot print upon it. This is beautiful and unique, but it also blemishes the perfect smoothness of the sand that the ocean just created. But God takes those imperfections, and just like a wave of ocean, washes away the blemishes from us.

God erodes away, reshaping our intentions for good. He buries our sins in the sand, in the patterns of his plan painted with the shells, seaweed and sand. God makes things grow out of sand.