The Temple that Stood by the Sea
I was 17 years old when I wrote the first draft of this piece. Almost a decade later, the story has not strayed from my heart.
The young man built the walls with stones that had been hauled from the east, and with ash he had pulled from each fire he’d burned along the way.
Black hair shining in the Black Sea sun, he labored ’til the air grew cold and thin.
Each day the sunrise saw his bent back as
Stone upon stone, each day he lay.
Each day the temple in his hands and the temple in his mind collided before him.
Verses danced in his heart like the laughing girls that sometimes gathered at the marketplace before sunset.
He parted his lips and opened his lungs. His verses rose up with the wind, his bronze arms lifting heavy white stones. He wondered if God was listening. He hoped that He was.
He imagined gold streets lined with beautiful women, an endless wealth; an eternal feast against a soul’s desperate aches of poverty, need, and want.
He imagined himself sitting at God’s right hand with his father and mother and sister beside him. He imagined peace.
If the only place there has ever truly been peace was in the mind of a faithful servant of God,
There has been Peace.
Forgoing sleep in favor of work, he ached beneath the Sun, singing all the while.
Finally, the walls were finished.
The young man stepped inside and smiled. He imagined his mother’s face smiling back at him. He had suffered so much to build this temple to God.
That very first night in his finished Work, he did not sing, but prayed.
He prayed for himself, and for the family he did not have. He prayed with the hope that every young man must hold in their heart if they are to go on living. He prayed for the earth and it’s lost and broken people. He prayed for food. He prayed for water. Ever did he pray for water.
He prayed for the Temple and the nearby Sea that sparkled with the light of the sun. He prayed for the one he loved, though he did not know her name. Tired of waiting, he waited still, and sleep, at long last, came.
He woke with his knees still bare on the floor, his tired and tortured back still bent. His eyes blinked and opened to the morning sun, illuminating the most beautiful structure ever built,
With every facet of light reflecting God. The verses, so carefully carved in the gleaming white stones, glittered His Word in the dew of the dawn. Seeing the beauty of his labors, the beauty of Christ, the beauty of Providence, the beautiful young man, of course,
began to sing.
He sang to the Sun and the Sand and the Flowers. He sang the Faith of the Blind and the Prayers of the Deaf. At long last the young man, made even more lovely from all his Good Work, was simply free to sing
and sing
and sing,
Ever hoping his voice could reach God’s ears.
Then, barefoot, in the sand by the Sea, the young man’s songs of Mercy and Grace were interrupted by a rumble in the earth. Somewhere, a new mountain range formed, a bosom of new life blossoming in kind.
But in the desert,
by the sea,
the most beautiful Temple ever erected came tumbling to the ground. There is not one stone, not one, that will not be cast down. The man watched in a silence altogether new to him.
The detailed carvings he’d slaved over had become the dust he coughed from his lungs. The alter he’d built was in as many pieces as his spirit, beyond recognition, from the tremble of the earth. There was nothing left in sight that seemed to show of God.
And yet by His Grace, and His everlasting Mercy, the broken builder felt closer to Him than ever before. When once again he dropped to his knees, the sand absorbed the shock.
With a heart so full it could’ve burst, his warm tenor lifted up to the sky.
Dearly Beloved,
For the first time, god heard His child, covered in dust, sing.
-written by M. Shultz