Riding the Waves
This week I spent two days away from home at “Tambourine Dream,” an annual women’s festival on the Sea of Galilee.
It was two days of dancing and drumming and swimming and praying and singing and reconnecting with old friends I hadn’t seen in many years.
After the festival ended, I spent half an hour writing down the highlights from the festival, the insights it gifted me.
And one main image stuck out in my mind.
I remembered what it felt like to stand up to my neck in the water, being bumped over and over by the waves of the Kinneret. Jumping the wave, jumping the wave. Which reminded me of what it felt like to jump for hours into the waves of the Atlantic when I was a girl. Which reminded me, then, of the incredible women I have met recently who are riding the waves of life–a mother who lost her year-old son during a bus bombing, a friend whose husband left her and her many children for another woman, a young mother whose 15-year-old daughter will soon be entering the hospital for 5 months for cancer treatment.
And it’s a terrible, heart-wrenching thing to see.
Yet also wondrous.
To see how, like a life jacket, faith buoys them above the whirlpools, the tidal waves, the tsunamis of life.
Tears, pain, grief eased by the eternal balm of Hashem’s love.
