the clock on the beach

The other day I was walking down by the beach with a good friend of mine. It's Sun Run training time again, and if you're going to train, you might as well train with a view. We had gotten into one of those existential discussions about life and love and one of us asked the question, "how is it that sometimes the right person just walks into your life?" I guess I've been thinking about my brother who is getting married this summer to a woman he met at a worship conference. It's not so strange a meeting until you consider that he is a Canadian studying in England and she is an American who was on her way to South Africa and stopped off in England for the conference. They have never lived in the same country in the entire time they've been together, but love has found them all the same.

As we were mulling all this over (in the way that friends do while walking on the beach) I happened to look up and see an old clock up at the top of the stairs by the pier. I have walked this beach maybe a hundred times since I moved here, and I swear I have never seen that clock before. And it struck me that maybe that's how love sometimes find us -- walking along a familiar route and looking up at the right time in the right place and there is it. That clock has been there for years, much longer than I have been in town. It didn't move, it didn't call out. I just looked up and there it was and I don't know how I missed it before.

For me the next obvious question has to be, "so why did I look up? Why that day?" Or possibly the more important question "how do I know when it's time to look up?" I have no idea what the answers to those questions are. But it's three more months until the Sun Run. Plenty of time for many more walks on the beach.