It’s overcast as I leave the house at 6:30. I consider waiting until after my 9:00 meeting but I just don’t think the sun is going to make any more of a showing then than it is now. We have seen more sun this week than last but only in the afternoons and it is looking like today is a complete no show.

There is a Jehovah’s Witness sitting with his church literature at the top of the stairs. We have a small jovial conversation. I might not see eye to eye with his beliefs but I admire that he gets up earlier than most to come here and do what he thinks is the right thing. I want to have a positive connection with him here. The words we exchange are mostly inane and meaningless but they make me feel good.

When I get to the shore, there is a large drop off at the bottom of the ramp to the sand - maybe almost two feet. There has also been a lot of sand loss at the base of the rocks at the bottom of the bluff since I was last here on Monday.

The most notable sight here is a family with two young children running around the sand and the shallow edge of the water. It’s 6:45 in the morning. These people are acting like it is 9 am. I want to ask them if they are visiting from the east coast. I figure they must be jet lagged. I don’t. It feels like it would be weird.

I hike up a few steps of rocks to get to a good spot to set down my pack and then I head to the water.

The tide is low and getting lower. The surf is pretty smallish but I wait for a set to pass before heading out to the surf line. I stumble over some rocks that I did not anticipate, which is my cue to start swimming.

I watch as every thought vanishes into the water that I had wondering if this swim at this hour was maybe not a great idea. It was a great idea. The water feels good and everything around me feels good.

The water is pretty much the same temperature it has been for weeks. It just can’t seem to make its way into the mid sixties. We need more sun and heat. However, I am very satisfied with where we are at. This 63 degrees is a world away from 59.

As I swim I am searching for light. I am trying to absorb all of the goodness in this ocean. I believe this light is all around me in great abundance. I observe the water that fills the expanse between my body and the ocean floor and then circles the entire globe to meet me right back here. It’s the same water that makes up more than half of my own body and every other person and creature on this planet. Everything is bound together in this water. Our separateness is just one perspective. I think of a waterfall and how it is composed of billions of drops in one moment and another different billion drops in the next moment yet I observe a single waterfall and not the drops.

With every stroke I reach forward and beyond my own self to bring myself to a place it was not a moment before. I want to feel my internal energy move forward forward and ever forward. I feel myself moving with and through and against the current. I concentrate to perceive myself as an expanding presence. I am just this spec hovering on the surface of the Pacific ocean and yet I am the ocean as well.

I am flushing out the thoughts and internal arguments I have been obsessing over this week. Largely I have been preoccupied with a discussion I observed Tuesday night at a church get together. There was much talk of the depravity of our times and the sin of our nation and how the LGBTQ are out to ruin us all. As I listen to that conversation I feel my body shrink and plunge into a hole. Am I on a different planet? This mindset where each individual must express their sexuality within rigidly defined boundaries crafted by God and there is no wiggle room for deviation - there is a way that is pleasing to God and everything else is sin. Everything is just so - well ordered and compartmentalized into categories of right and wrong universally applicable to all beings over all time. Never mind that a casual look down church history will show endless debates over how the moral fabric of this suchness should be patterned and these debates include a lot of torture and death.

My church is covering the book of Romans which I totally dig, but if you read it literally and try to identify with it’s first century Jewish author’s way of looking at the world, things get dark. I don’t know, that is at least how I feel. The idea that the gospel is all about the fact that humans blew it and brought sin into the world and need to be forgiven in order to ensure an eternal spot in heaven and avoid hell, it all feels so unreal and hoaky and I just can’t connect with it. I feel like this message has to be reimagined if it is going to help and resonate with a modern people. I think that is what Jesus was trying to do - trying to get people out of this mindset of the need for retributive judgement for sin. I can hear him thinking, “you want to believe that you need to endlessly atone for your sinful actions to avoid divine damnation? Fine, then kill me and let me be your last sacrifice.”

I see Christ and I see a message of love and mercy and how faith in that love and mercy forges a path to freedom or, in biblical terms, eternal life. But I am tired of debating this with people in my head. The point has got to be not to argue about what is right but to live it. Otherwise I am not moving forward at all but just stagnating as I ruminate over how I want other people to think.

So here I am in this water trying to let go of the intellectual friction I feel with this view and that view. I want to receive the mercy of this ocean and move forward soaking wet as it drips off of me and hopefully never dries.