We went recently stayed in a nice hotel near the beach on the Mississippi coast, the one we usually stay at when visiting the beach. After spending the last week and a half doing a whole of lot of babysitting (I heart babies!!!), breaking my toe with a frying pan, getting into a horrid altercation with a particularly nasty lesbo (my fault, I admit) and ripping a jagged hole in my absolute most favorite leather jacket, ruining it forever…my hubby decided I needed a vacation. On the way back from Eddy’s place I was surprised to find us going east rather than west until we wound up on the coast, pulling up to the same hotel that’s become something of a home away from home for me.
I tend to become attached to places now, even cheap hotels on the beach, provided I’ve had special times there. This is the place me and the gang always crash at when we hit the beach. Odd that our hanging out here recovering from sunburns and the fatigue associated with cavorting on the beach all day would endear the place to me. Yet it has. I love that little hotel. I even tend to insist on the same room whenever possible and I endeavor to conveniently forget that anyone else ever stays there while I’m away. I consider the place “my” room. I’m very, very comfortable and relaxing, something difficult for to do in most other instances, is almost automatic there.
Yeah, I’m just weird like that.

Now my husband collects sand dollars. It’s kind of new thing for him and he only has about a dozen, having started this, I’m fairly sure, the first time we went to the beach together (the whole gang). Even in this instance I suppose he considered this a trip to the beach, even though we didn’t actually go to the beach all weekend. Never mind what we did all weekend, that’s none of your business. You cheeky monkey.

Coming out of the shower on Sunday I noticed he’d bought a little packaged sand dollar and there it was sitting on the dresser with the car keys, the kind you might pick up in a gift shop or such. Which is exactly where he got it, natch. I knew instantly that it had occurred to him that since this was a “trip to the beach” that he felt compelled to find and add one to his collection. But since we didn’t actually go to the beach, he’d gone and bought one instead from off a little novelty rack down in the lobby. Which struck me as completely silly and I naturally intended to egg him about it a bit.

Now in the process of this egging the topic of the legend surrounding the sand dollar came up and I confessed interest. It seems one of those things that everyone in the world knows about but me. I’d honestly never heard it before. For those of you unfamiliar the legend holds, rather loosely, that the five slits in the sand dollar represent the five wounds of Christ (one for each nailed hand and foot, plus one from the soldier’s spear). On top of the that a pretty accurate representation of the Easter Lily and the Christmas poinsettia are engraved naturally on the front and back of the sand dollar. Now all that’s fairly interesting but the real kicker is that if you break open the sand dollar (which hubby was excited enough to actually do, once he realized I’d never heard this story and he had the opportunity to be the one to introduce me to it) there are five white doves made of sand inside.
The entire thing is very fragile, vrey beautiful and quite frankly amazing. I was really surprised I’d never heard this before.

Now I tend to be dubious about miracles and any other obvious signs from God but I’m also aware there happen to be plenty of such in the world. Some are obvious and some are so obvious they’re easily dismissed. Ally’s favorite examples are all the astronomical stuff, such as the precise distance of the moon from the earth, just close to stir the tides just so that life is possible without flooding the whole place. That coupled with the fact that this precises distance just so happens to exactly the distance necessary for solar eclipses to occur is pretty interesting. What are the odds? Any closer, no life is possible and no solar eclipses. Any farther…same thing. Ally can stand there and rattle of about a hundred little facts like that and have your head spinning.
A Christian hears that stuff and just nods, hmm, of course. An atheist sees it as proof that the universe is random and all life the product of several orders of insanely improbable happenstances. Which Christians conversely see as proof that atheists are all complete lunatics.
No pun intended.

The sand dollar thing, though. Hearing that was pretty exciting to me, I was honestly awed. When I considered it carefully a bit more I was naturally dubious that this was some overt act of God, though. I’ve seen far too many Christians get swept up with ideas that excited them and end up looking completely foolish to everyone with a brain. My current favorite examples remains all the knuckleheads who still to this day swear that Hurricane Katrina was some act of God. Do not even get me started on how utterly inane that idea is.
Short answer: Luke 13:1-5

So today I went surfing the interwebz on the subject of the Easter Lily and the Christmas poinsettia. I admit I didn’t devote hours of research to this but I still would have expected to find some clear indication that these two plants were biblical symbols. I didn’t find any such thing. The Easter Lily, in fact, seems to have become an “easter” lily sometime after Christ’s death and resurrection, with the early paintings depicting the Archangel Gabriel giving some to the Virgin Mary. Nevertheless it is apparently another example of the Catholic church converting pagan symbols (of which the Lilium Longiforum is such) into Christian symbols. I will admit though that the general term “lily” is used biblically to refer to Christ but no specific kind of lily is usually singled out.
The Christmas Poinsettia is likewise a pretty new thing, dating back to around 1828. It’s a tropical shrub, after all. Not too many of those growing wild in the middle east. In point of fact it wasn’t commonly accepted as the “Christmas” poinsettia until well into the 20th century.

Now all of this doesn’t eliminate the idea that the sand dollar itself might well have been specifically designed to reflect current trends or that current trends themselves have been nudged into place by God to support the mystique of the sand dollar legend. It does however make it extremely unlikely. As unlikely as the distance of the moon from the earth being pure coincidence. And so I’m forced to reject the idea that this is some overt miracle.

Here’s the real kicker, though. I’m fine with that. Yeah, it’s a little disappointing that this oh-so-cool sand dollar legend isn’t a clear cut miracle. Honestly, that would really, really be cool. But the sand dollar itself stands on it’s own as sign of God’s handiwork.
I mean, have you ever taken a good look at these things? They’re amazing! The “sand”, as it happens, isn’t even sand at all, it’s the dried out skeleton of this little ocean larvae that washes up on the beach and gets bleached white by the sun. It’s just the bones of some dead fish that got washed up. And yet when you find one on the beach you have in hand a remarkable little piece of art that’s so fragile you’re a little amazed it survived intact long enough for you to have found it. The likelihood that it’s beauty and fragility are purely accidental is laughable. It’s so clearly one of a million little works of art of which God seems to have flung about the universe by the double-handful.
Absolutely beautiful. Awe-inspiring.

How do you explain to an unbeliever that this is the signature of God writ large across the masterful work of art that is the universe? Well, you can’t. They just don’t get it. You look like silly person trying to something that’s so obvious to you that to those that are so blind to it.
Which I think is the real proof that these beautiful littlethings were designed by God specifically so that we could all enjoy and share in His artwork. Such a thing wouldn’t be so obvious to any but those who are aware of Him. To unbelievers…they’re just pretty little clumps of gritty larvae bones. And so be it.