I'm writing this from Garden City Beach, South Carolina.

If you've never been here, that's understandable. Garden City tends to get overshadowed by its louder neighbors. Myrtle Beach is about fifteen minutes north if you're looking for entertainment, traffic, souvenir shops, and enough miniature golf to occupy several lifetimes. Murrells Inlet is about five minutes south if you're looking for fresh seafood, sunset boat tours, and restaurants that will happily separate you from your paycheck in exchange for shrimp and oysters.

Garden City just sits there quietly being a beach.

No need to impress anybody.
No need to set tourism records.
Just sand, surf, and the occasional golf cart doing something that probably violates at least one traffic law.

I love it here.

One of my goals for this vacation is to eat fresh local oysters every single day. Some people keep gratitude journals. I keep oyster counts.

So far, I am pleased to report that my spiritual discipline is progressing nicely.

The funny thing is, though, that I've started realizing my love of oysters isn't really about oysters. At least not entirely.

It's about memory.
It's about family.
It's about the strange way certain places and certain foods become time machines when you aren't expecting it.

My parents loved the beach.

When I was growing up, we spent a lot of summers at Wrightsville Beach. Looking back now, I think they probably loved it for many of the same reasons I love Garden City.

The beach wasn't just a destination.
It was an escape hatch.

We weren't poor exactly, but nobody was writing books about our investment portfolio. Most summers we'd stay at my grandmother's trailer in Wilmington and head to Wrightsville Beach every morning. Every now and then, we'd get to stay at my uncle's beach house, which felt impossibly fancy to a kid whose primary life goals were finding sharks' teeth and not getting sunscreen in his eyes.

Looking back now, I'm honestly not sure how my parents pulled some of those trips off. At the time, of course, I never thought about any of that.

When you're ten years old, you don't spend much time wondering how the bills got paid. You just know somebody packed the car, somebody found enough money for gas, and somehow you're standing ankle-deep in saltwater before lunch.

Honestly, that’s all the economics a kid needs.

We'd sit under umbrellas for hours. We'd body surf until we were exhausted. We'd dig for sand fiddlers and act like we'd discovered buried treasure. We'd get sunburned despite repeated warnings not to get sunburned, proving once again that children often treat parental wisdom as merely a suggestion.

At the time, those vacations felt ordinary.

Now they feel priceless.

Looking back, I understand something I couldn't see as a kid. My parents weren't buying vacations.

They were building memories.
They were creating places I would carry with me long after they were gone.

I don't know if they realized they were doing that.

Then again, maybe they did.

The oysters are part of that story too.

Every year our family reunions in Wilmington featured oyster steams.

If you've never experienced one, imagine several picnic tables lined up end to end. Then imagine piles of oysters dumped directly onto those tables. Then imagine generations of relatives gathered around them talking, laughing, telling stories, and making a glorious mess.

That's basically the event. We'd stand there for hours. Somebody's uncle would tell the same story he'd told the previous seventeen years. Somebody else would laugh at it like they'd never heard it before.

Kids would run around.
Adults would catch up.
Nobody was pairing oysters with artisanal beverages.
People were just together.

And honestly, that may be one of the reasons those memories have lasted.

These days I prefer oysters raw on the half shell. Somewhere along the way I became one of those people who talks about oysters the way wine people talk about wine, which would have deeply confused younger me.

Younger me just wanted to know whether there were enough crackers and cocktail sauce (OK, fine, ketchup and hot sauce). Honestly, that's still a pretty good question, but now it’d be horseradih and Texas Pete.

But every time I sit down and order a dozen oysters, those family reunions come rushing back.

The sounds.
The smells.
The stories.

The feeling of belonging to something bigger than yourself.

It's amazing how much memory can fit inside an oystervshell.

My parents have both passed away now.

Most days, grief is quieter than it used to be. It doesn't kick the door off its hinges anymore. These days it usually slips in unnoticed.

A song.
A story.
A smell.
A beach.
An oyster.

The older I get, the more I realize my parents are still showing up in my life.

Not in spooky ways. Nobody's rattling chains in a beach condo. But they show up in memories. In habits. In the little things I catch myself doing and realize came straight from them.

Yesterday, I was sitting in Murrells Inlet eating oysters and suddenly thinking about family reunions from decades ago. Not because I was trying to. Not because I'd scheduled a time for reflection.

It just happened.

The people we love have a way of doing that.

They don't disappear from our lives so much as they change addresses.
They move into our stories.
They settle into our habits.
They hide inside recipes, songs, traditions, and places.

And every now and then something opens the door and there they are again.

Love leaves fingerprints on things.

It leaves fingerprints on beach chairs.
It leaves fingerprints on family recipes.
It leaves fingerprints on old stories told around picnic tables.
It leaves fingerprints on us.

One of the reasons I love the beach is that it reminds me how little the ocean cares about my agenda.

The tide comes in.
The tide goes out.
The waves keep rolling.
The seagulls somehow continue looking cooler than the rest of us.

Meanwhile, I've spent half the year worrying about things that suddenly seem very small while staring at the Atlantic Ocean.

The beach has a way of exposing that.

The world spends most of its time trying to convince us that our value comes from what we accomplish. How productive we are. How successful we become. How much we achieve.

Then you spend a few days by the water and remember that maybe life isn't a performance review.

Maybe watching a sunrise counts.
Maybe laughing with people you love counts.
Maybe resting counts.
Maybe sitting quietly and watching waves counts.
Maybe eating oysters while looking out at the inlet counts.

I'm not saying oysters are a sacrament.

I'm just saying the evidence is mounting.

Tomorrow I'll probably order another dozen oysters. (Strictly for theological research, of course).

Then I'll sit on the beach. 
Think about my parents.
Watch the seagulls show off.
Listen to the waves.
And be grateful for the people who taught me to love places like this.

Not because they explained theology to me.

But because they handed me a beach chair, pointed me toward the ocean, and gave me memories sturdy enough to last a lifetime.

That's not a bad legacy.

And honestly?

That's about as good a theology as I've found this week.