Kiawah Bound
Return to Sermons, Writing & Memoirs We went to the beach last week. It’s the cool thing to do in the summer in the Carolinas, go to the beach, eat, hang-out, read, swim a little, and sleep. We did all those things and more for a week. Vacations may be the closest thing most Christians come to honoring the Sabbath.
We went to Kiawah, which is really a fun word if you keep saying it over and over again, as our Hannah likes to do. Kiawah is an island south of Charleston, about 5 hours from us. The beach is large and the island runs east to west, with the beach facing south. So the waves are tiny and the water is bathwater warm. All 3 kids boogie boarded until both parents were totally exhausted. We adults read Heaven Lake by John Dalton, an excellent novel about a less-than-ethical Jesus teacher in China. Ann read a book of poems by Emily Dickinson too, and I read another book in the Prince Roger saga by David Weber and John Ringo, military sci-fic, my guilty pleasure.
The beach itself is huge, and a perfect place to ride bikes, both on and off the beach. Ann and I taught Hannah to ride her new purple bike on the hard packed sand, because if she took a header off the handle bars, she’d only land in sand. Kiawah sports over 10 miles of bike paths, so the family tooled all around Kiawah, visiting a general store, a hotel carnival, and a flag football game, as well as all of the natural wonders.
Kiawah is a natural paradise. Animals abound there, in a manner reminiscent of earlier, more pristine America. The boys and Hannah captured a baby tiger shark, about a foot and a half long, and each held it before they let it go. Crabs litter the beach, and the kids captured those too. Loggerhead turtles nest in the dunes, so there are laws and rangers to protect them. Gators lurk in the ponds, but we didn’t see any this time, only signs warning us they were there. We saw Osprey nests, and the parents feeding the young. And deer were everywhere: they are the chief obstacles to watch out for on bikes. In the dense marshes and thick, mule deer breed and flourish, without wolves or Carolina panthers (the animals, not the players) to thin the herd. My preference in vacations is to get re-connected to natural beauty and wonder, even if it means something will likely be biting, stinging, or slime-ing on me occasionally.
Kiawah is a gated community, which means you can’t get in if you don’t have an invitation or a place (like a hotel reservation) to go. There are two gatehouses on the island. The gate houses are to keep the hoi polloi out and the riffraff at bay, but somehow we got in. The first one is as you enter the island itself. If you are staying at a hotel there, or a condo, or renting a friend’s house, or playing golf there, this is where you’d stay. The second gatehouse is deep into Kiawah, and it screens the rest of the island from the multi-million dollar homes on the last third of the island, as well as Kiawah’s Ocean Course, site of the 2012 U.S. PGA Championship. The homes on this part of Kiawah are magnificent and incredible. There is really no good way to describe their architectural marvels. The gated aspect of it keeps the beaches bare (of people, not clothes). The nearest folks to us were 200 yards away on the left and the right. Kiawah is almost a private beach.
The house we stay in the first one built after the second gatehouse. It’s a wonderful house, with trees all around that give me the feeling I’m in a tree house, and just a very short walk, about 50 yards, to the beach. Still, in the light of many of the other homes, this one is modest. There are huge homes that are bigger than most homes in Greensboro. For example, 3 doors down (and across the cul-de-sac) Michael Jordon’s agent is building a “beach house” that is 29,000 square feet, for himself, not Michael. I’m not sure our entire church building is has that much square footage.
Maybe I’m wrong about this, but that seems overdone and obscene. Maybe the guy is a faithful Christian and gives a huge chuck of change to World Vision and will use this house as a Young Life camp. I certainly hope so, but I also doubt it. I had the urge more that once to do what the singer in Five Man Electric Band did in the old song, Signs:
So I stood on the fence and yelled at the house, ‘Man, what gives you the right, to put up a fence to keep me out and to keep Mother Nature in? If God were here he’d tell you to your face, “Man, you’re some kind of sinner.”’
I know, I know: the song dates me and I know something about property rights, but sometimes I think one of the darkest day in human history was when someone long ago put a fence around a piece of land, and the other humans let him.
I love Kiawah, and our times there are magical. We come back with Teva tans on our feet, smiles on our souls, and sand just about everywhere else. Rest is a good thing, and hanging with Ann and the kids is healing. My beach time is a reminder that we are meant to rest too, as well as work, as God rested on the Sabbath. Most of us can’t spend our lives at the beach (trust me on this: many of my San Diego friends have tried) but beach times of rest and Sabbath make life sweeter and richer.
Michael
1601 Walker Avenue, Greensboro, NC 27403
cpbcgbo@bellsouth.net
336.273.1779
