Alone, But Never Lonely

I had wanted to see the Galápagos ever since I first heard about it, briefly, in a school classroom years earlier, always wondering what could possibly make a place so famous. Planning the trip itself was the easy part. Being a planner does not make you brave, and I felt the difference clearly the morning I stood there, getting ready to head out toward the ocean before sunrise. I told myself I was an adventurer. That this was going to be exciting.

I had pictured a path that opened up and let me see the ocean stretching out ahead of me the whole way there. Instead, I felt a little like Dorothy on that yellow brick road — committed to a trail with no idea what waited along it before I would finally reach the water.

Underneath that small pep talk to myself, a quieter voice was asking something else. Why was I really out here? What was I actually hoping to find, so early, so far from anyone, with nothing but a camera and an idea of an ocean I could not even see yet?

I did not have an answer. I just knew I had to keep walking to find out.

The trail climbed a small rise and dropped back down, curved right, then curved left, then straightened out again for what felt like forever. Trees leaned in close on both sides, the green swallowing the path just past where my eyes could reach. The farther I walked, the more alone I felt — surrounded by life in every direction, and still entirely by myself.

I [God] will never leave you nor forsake you. (Hebrews 13:5)

I knew that verse. I just was not sure yet whether I believed what God was saying applied to me on that particular morning, on that particular path, with no one else around for miles.

The heat had settled in fully by then, thick and humid, the kind that makes you feel every step instead of just taking it. My legs were tired. My camera bag seemed to grow heavier the farther I walked, mostly because I had no idea how much further I had to go. More than once I thought about turning back, except turning back meant walking the same unknown distance in the opposite direction, so there was no real relief in that option either. The only way out of feeling alone on that path was to keep walking through it.

That is when I really noticed them — the cactus trees lining the trail. They rose up out of the underbrush taller than anything I expected, towering, covered in thorns from base to crown, spaced out like sentries posted there on purpose. My first thought was that they were guarding the path from whatever lived out past the tree line.

But that was not it. I have been pricked by thorns like that before, and never once on the path itself — only when I decided the path was too slow or too quiet and cut my own way off into the brush instead. Those thorns were not there to protect me from the world. They were there to protect me from myself, from the exact moment I might decide I knew a faster way through. I had to wonder, right there on the trail, whether God had laid out this path — already accounting for exactly where I would be tempted to wander off, long before I ever took my first step on it.

And then something moved. A lizard, small, perched low on the rock wall lining the trail, with a head the color of fire — bright orange, almost burning — sitting on a body the color of dust. I stopped without meaning to. He was nothing like me, and for a second I felt that small pull to just keep walking, the way I do with most things that do not look like they have anything to say to me.

But I crouched down instead. And I had to laugh. Because that was exactly when it became clear I was not actually alone out there, not in any way I would have scripted for myself. Just a strange little lizard on a rock wall, watching me as closely as I was watching him. I had been so certain no one else was on that path. God had been with me the entire time, and this small, strange creature was the proof I was not alone.

You [God] make known to me the path of life; in Your presence there is fullness of joy. (Psalm 16:11)

I did not expect joy to show up looking like a lizard. But that is exactly what it was.

I took his picture. He never moved, so I left him there and started walking again, carrying that small reassurance with me.

Eventually the trees thinned, the light changed color, and the green gave way all at once to open sky. The path dropped me out onto a beach shortly after sunrise.

I looked to the right first. Sand, pale and empty, fading into a little scatter of dark lava rock far off down the shore. That was it, the end of the trail. That was the whole reward. Seriously? I walked all that way for this?

I do not know what I was expecting. Some sense of arrival, maybe, after pushing through all that heat and uncertainty. This was clearly not the arrival I had pictured. But my eye kept moving across that empty stretch of sand, the way you do when you are not quite ready to accept what you are looking at, and that is when I finally saw something.

One small bird, down near the water, standing there looking out at the ocean like it had been waiting for someone to notice. I almost dismissed even that — one plain little bird on all that sand seemed too small a thing to call a reward. There was so little else out there that I simply stood still, looking around, trying to decide what to do with an empty beach. I could have turned around right then and walked all the way back. Instead I chose to stay, to get low, and to actually look for whatever this place had for me before I gave up on it. I sat right in the sand to watch the bird, and the longer I watched, the more I noticed something. He never reacted to me at all. I might as well have been another rock on the beach.

There was something almost funny about that, once I thought it through. I was so unimpressed with this little bird, and he was even less impressed with me, because he was utterly absorbed in something far more impressive than either of us. He was looking out at the ocean, small against all that water, and seemed completely unbothered by the enormity of all he could see.

Sitting there watching him watch the horizon, I felt my own smallness the same way I was seeing his. I was on a small island, in the middle of the largest ocean on earth, on a planet circling one star among billions, in a universe so vast our best instruments cannot find its edge. A dot, watching a dot, both of us looking out at something with no visible end — and both of us, it turned out, already seen by God, who had been watching us long before either of us thought to look out at anything at all.

That realization is when I finally understood what I had really been hoping to find out there. Not the ocean. Not a good photograph. I had been hoping, without knowing how to say it, that I was not as alone as I felt. And sitting in that sand, something in me went quiet, because the answer had already arrived before I ever asked the question. This was not just about me looking for God. More often than I give credit for, God is the one looking for me — already there, already present, before I ever thought to start searching. Not a one-time rescue followed by silence. God wanted an actual, ongoing closeness with me — wanted it long before I ever knew to want that same closeness with Him.

I sat there a long moment, almost afraid to move, like moving might break the closeness I was suddenly aware of. The God of a universe this vast, who set every star in place across a sky I could not begin to measure, the same sky stretching out now in that quiet, endless horizon in front of me, was already sitting with me on a beach I had walked to on purpose, never once realizing what was actually waiting for me there.

The bird kept doing exactly what he had been doing the whole time — watching the water, completely unaware that anything had changed. But something had changed in me. I was sitting in the sand with tears in my eyes, and it was not because of the bird. It was because of God, using that one small, unremarkable bird to make His own presence suddenly, unmistakably real to me. I had walked all that way braced for grand scenery or some dramatic encounter with wildlife. Instead, God used the most ordinary thing on that beach to reach me more deeply than any of that ever could have.

I stayed a while longer after that, just watching the light shift across the sand as the morning went on.

Another bird's shadow stretched long and dark across the sand ahead of it. I looked at it for a second before it actually landed on me. That shadow was not behind the bird, marking ground it had already crossed. It stretched out in front, into sand it had not even reached yet — which meant the light had to be behind this tiny bird the entire time.

Later still, with the sun climbing higher, I noticed different bird whose shadow had pulled in close beneath its own feet instead of stretching out anywhere at all. Same beach, same kind of bird, two different moments of one sunrise — and the shadow had changed shape completely, depending only on where the light happened to be sitting in the sky. The shadow was never the same twice. The light, somewhere behind or above, never once left.

Your word [God] is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. (Psalm 119:105)

A lamp does not just show you which way to turn. The light from it goes ahead of you, into ground you have not stepped on yet, already lighting the next step before you ever take it. That is exactly what I had just watched happen, over and over, in the sand at my feet.

Watching it happen made something else click into place. Shadows do not create themselves. They are evidence of light falling on something real, proof that whatever cast that shadow was standing in the path of light, whether the creation noticed or not. I realized, sitting there, that I see my own shadow almost every day and rarely think anything of it. But every shadow I have ever cast is proof of God's presence with me — His light going before me, behind me, above me, surrounding me, giving me evidence every single day that I am never alone.

You are the God who sees me. (Genesis 16:13)

Being seen is not the same as being watched from a safe distance. It means nothing about you gets missed — not the tiredness in your legs, not the disappointment of an empty beach, not the years you spent feeling unnoticed and assuming that meant you actually were unseen. God was not glancing my way that morning. God was already there, fully attentive, before I ever sat down.

I told myself I was an adventurer back at the start of that path, mostly to talk myself into that first step. But looking back on it now, I truly did go on an adventure. And I did not take that adventure by myself. I was walking beside the One who had already gone ahead of me, already knew where the trail turned, already sitting in the sand before I ever sat down beside Him.

I went looking for an ocean that morning. I still do not know exactly what I expected to find out there. But I know now what I was actually hoping for the whole time, even before I had words for it. I was hoping I was not as alone as I felt.

I was never alone out there. I am not alone now, either, even on the days nothing around me has changed.

And neither are you. The next time you see your own shadow, remember what it means. Light is falling on you. You are not standing there by yourself.

You were made to be seen by the same God who was sitting in that sand before I ever sat down. Whatever quiet, empty-feeling stretch of beach you happen to be standing on right now, you are not alone on it. You never have been.

As July begins, I find myself thinking ahead to the Fourth, and this year especially, since it marks two hundred and fifty years since this country was declared one nation under God. The same God who saw this nation born is the God who sees you, individually, right where you are standing today — already looking for you, even before you ever thought to look for Him. You are not alone. He is ready to celebrate with you. That might be the bigger thing worth celebrating this year. Happy Fourth of July.