One of my favorite places to visit when I lived in Cape Town was Blouberg Strand. Most of the iconic photos of Cape Town have been taken from here as you look across the bay onto the table like profile of Table Mountain with its cloth of cloud hanging over the side. The beach is wide and you can sit there wriggling your toes in the warm soft sand watching the seagulls scrapping for food and listening to the waves as they roll in and crash upon the beach. As the smell of seaweed wafts by and the seagulls screech overhead, the waves mesmerize you rolling in and sucking back.  I found there was something very healing just sitting watching the waves meditating on the timelessness of the ocean. It has been there from the beginning of Creation, the Spirit of God hovered over the surface of the waters before there was light. God “laid the earth’s foundation on the seas and built it on the ocean depths, He assigned the sea its boundaries and locked the oceans in vast reservoirs.”

My move to Cape Town was several years after my divorce where I had to make a new life for the children and I. It was a beautiful place to make a new start and we would go down to the beach quite often. I enjoyed living at the sea after having lived inland for most of my life. That time of rest at the beach from the hard work of being a single parent used to refresh me as the children enjoyed playing in the sand at the water’s edge. In winter it was a different scene when gale force winds would whip up the foam and the sea became an angry and seething mass of waves crashing onto the beach bringing up flotsam from the ocean floor. Occasionally the tide would rise so high it crossed the boardwalk onto the road and I was reminded that the Lord “defines the ocean’s sandy shoreline as an everlasting boundary that the waters cannot cross. The waves may toss and roar, but they can never pass the boundaries I set.”

Years later after moving countries and I was in a serious condition with pneumonia and could not travel to visit my daughter for a special birthday, I was reminded of this time at Blouberg and I did a painting to comfort myself as my travel plans were cancelled, “All your waves and billows have gone over me, and floods of sorrow pour upon me like a thundering cataract.” I drew myself as a vulnerable tiny person held in God’s hand as the waves washed over His hand protecting me. In the curl of the wave I drew a tree representing Psalm 23, leading me besides still waters, that even though the waves were billowing over me, I could still find the peace.

Sometimes we may have to navigate more than one transition at a time, suffering a loss and having to relocate at the same time.  This can certainly put a strain on you as you work through grief and starting a new life somewhere else. At times life may just throw you a curved ball on top of this and you feel overwhelmed with the difficulties as they seem to roll in one after another in waves. That was certainly how I felt at that time.  But it was having imprinted on my memory the happy and beautiful times of sitting on Blouberg Beach, that I could make this a place of refuge in my mind. I would repeat The Lord is my Shepherd to myself and imagine I was sitting on the beach with the Lord beside me and knowing He had set a boundary for the sea, He also had set a boundary on my trials, the psalmist said “Give your burdens to the Lord. He will carry them. He will not permit the godly to slip or fall” and again, “He reached down from heaven and took me and drew me out of my great trials. He rescued me from deep waters.” Yes, I missed my daughter’s birthday, but I recovered my health and was able to visit another time. I was disappointed, but I was given the grace and the strength to see that trial through and my painting has encouraged others too when they have felt overwhelmed by the billows of life crashing over them.