The Double Sunrise

This week we took a day trip to the beach.  It was a picture perfect day...not the Outer Banks, but it had to suffice.  In every beach excursion, God manages to teach me something new.  I always search in hope to find more sea glass.  But, this time, God had a different gift to send.  This time, it was the "double sunrise" shell.  It is black on the outside and a beautiful iridescent blue on the inside.

In a chapter from my favorite book, "Gift from the Sea" by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, she wrote about the double sunrise and compares it to relationships.  "Both halves are exactly matched...each side, like the wing of a butterfly...from the golden hinge binding the two together."  Initially, this relationship is "pure, simple and unencumbered...like the artist's vision before he has to discipline it into form."  It is an image of two "flawless halves bound together with a single hinge, meeting each other at every point."  I love this image.

Well, this "double sunrise" is black and blue.  It is bruised, yet it has a beauty all its own.  It's fragile shell has somehow survived years of breakers on the beach.  Still, it remains connected at The Hinge.  In time, the bruise will fade.  It is being renewed.  It desperately longs to "meet at every point."

Tumbling in the water, others probably never even noticed or the ones who noticed saw it as just an ugly, paired, black seashell.  I am so glad that I noticed and heard another needed lesson by the sea.  I have this double sunrise sitting in my sun room where I will be reminded every day.