Meeting with God on the beach

Hi my name is Joshua! I wanted to write some blogs to describe a couple different ways God spoke to me on this trip. I hope you enjoy reading them, and I hope that you get something out of them like I did.

//

During my team’s trip to Puerto Rico one of the things we focused on was listening for God’s voice. This was one of the things I was most excited for on this trip, and I couldn’t wait to do it. One night we finally got around to doing it, and I was so excited but during the listening prayer I heard nothing. Absolutely nothing. I was so frustrated because a lot of my teammates had heard great things from Him and I didn’t get anything. I went to bed that night so angry with God for not speaking to me, and I was still mad at Him the entire next day and spent the day yelling at Him. But that night I was getting ready for bed and I just heard a voice say to me, “Tomorrow I am going to speak to you.” Now I was very excited that God had told me that, but I was still a little skeptical so I ignored it and went to bed.

The next morning during quiet time (30 minutes of just reading the Bible and talking with God) I was sitting on the beach right next to the water like I did every other day. As I was sitting there I kept trying to reach out and touch the waves that would hit the shore but I couldn’t because I was too far away. I really wanted to touch a wave but I eventually gave up thinking that it was impossible. Then a thought hit me, “Why don’t I just move closer to the water?” So being all proud of myself I went and sat closer to the water, and I was able to touch the waves. Crazy right! So I sat there a few minutes just touching the waves and then it hit me that God was trying to speak to me through the waves and I was ignoring him. That whole time I had been reaching out trying to touch God but I hadn’t been moving closer to him. So I want to encourage those of you who are reading this that feel like you are reaching out to God but he isn’t answering. Please just take a step of faith and move closer to God – you will find it’s a lot easier to reach him once you do so. 

//

Every day we would do this thing called quiet time where we would spend 30 minutes talking to the Lord and listening for Him. Every day during this time you could find me out at the beach sitting right next to the water so that I could touch the waves. But one day I decided I would sit further back on a bench and something amazing happened. I saw hermit crabs and not just a couple of hermit crabs but tons of them walking across the beach. Now if you know me, you would know I love nature and animals, so of course I sat there and watched them for a while. And believe it or not, God spoke to me through these little hermit crabs. And when I mean spoke I mean I wrote an entire page in my notebook in a couple minutes about hermit crabs which is ridiculously quick for me (I like to think God was controlling my hand because I don’t really remember writing a lot of it). But this is just what He wrote in my notebook.

As I sit and watch the hermit crabs it reminds me how much humans are like them. We all are constantly looking for something to shelter us much like hermit crabs (some examples of these things would be family, sports, work, or wealth). Because we all are looking for something different, we have different looking “shells” just like hermit crabs. These shells are constantly changing as we grow just like how hermit crabs change shells as they grow.
Now when we look at hermit crabs we often admire their shells of all things (like they are literally wearing a dead creature on them and that’s what we admire). Like shouldn’t we be looking at what is on the inside of the shell; I mean that is the living and breathing part of a hermit crab, not the shell. I feel like we do that with people a lot too. We look at their job, their house, their clothes, and their grades to name a few. But that shouldn’t define who a person is or how we look at them. Once we look past all these things and truly look at the person we can see how beautiful they really are. 

Love, Joshua