Simply Thriving

As a child, did you ever go the beach? After some time in the water, maybe you got your little bucket and started to build a sand castle. The sand near the water was the most wet and perfect for keeping the bucket shape. Bucket by bucket, the castle began to take a shape. After an hour or two, it was a masterpiece complete with twig flags and a moat. There is a problem with having to build so close to the water’s edge though. Every now and then (and sometimes not until the end) waves splash up oh so close and pull some of that beautiful castle back into the sea with them. What once was a perfect masterpiece is now missing the entire left wing! And can you stop that wave from reaching the castle? No! Even if you laid your little body between, some water would still get through. Now, this may be a silly little analogy, but it’s been on my heart a lot lately. In my pondering, my life is my sandcastle. Perfect no, but pretty well put together all things considered. And God? God is...

6:20am – My four year old is shouting in his unnaturally loud voice that he is awake. 6:22am – I go into his room, turn off the light and try to convince him that it’s not morning yet. 6:24am – He’s not buying it. The light is back on and he SHOUTS that he needs to pee. 6:25am – He keeps shouting because Daddy is in the bathroom getting ready for work. 6:26am – My five year old is awake and crying because of all of the shouting and bright lights. 6:27am – Now they both need to pee and are crying/shouting it at their door. 6:28am – The two year old is awake and crying too. 6:30am – I’ve only been awake for ten minutes but am now shouting as well for quiet, which is ironic. And the day begins. There is no oatmeal. How did it get missed on the shopping list? There is also no cereal, which means we will eat peanut butter and jam sandwiches. This is met with great consternation. The balance of life seems to be upset as PB&J is usually lunch fare. There is not enou...

It was a still afternoon, peaceful really. Sunny, at a pleasant twenty two degrees Celsius, it was the perfect afternoon to lie on the beach and work on a tan. Perfect, unless your name was Tony Stark. To Stark, the sun seemed a heartless predator; the sea a haughty tease. Asserting just enough willpower to pull his mind away from the now dull ache of his broken ribs and the hundreds of tiny cuts on his arms and thighs, he tried to remember how he had ended up in this position. Twenty four hours earlier he had met with Nick Fury to discuss an unfortunate development in the Middle East. In Ramla, Israel there was a warehouse storing Stark’s newest invention: Aerocarapace – cutting edge armor that he had been developing for S.H.I.E.L.D. Aerocarapace was strong enough to protect a person from anything short of a nuclear attack, yet small enough to be embedded in the skin in five anchor points around the body. To make it even easier to use, Stark had developed an oral trigger disg...