Imagine Your Victory Freedom Pages

Single but… Holding on (Part 8)

sandcastleSand castles can be large.  Sand castles can be small.   Some can resemble real castles, fictional characters, famous structures and take on many shapes and sizes, but at the end of the day, no matter how elaborate…all sandcastles are temporary.

Here are three things we can learn about relationships from sandcastles.

1.  Sandcastles are temporary

You can built them, pack them, shape them – but when force is exerted on it, it will fall.  Whether the force is wind, or rain, or water, or time it will fall.  It was never meant to be permanent, and everybody knew that.  If you build a sandcastle, you can bring furniture, lighting, decor, and family into it, but if you do that you will have to pretend that you didn’t know it wasn’t going to last.  Women do this in relationships.  They try to force permanent pieces into temporary dwellings.  When the structure fails everything is covered in sand that used to “look like” a real structure.

2.  Trying to preserve a sandcastle will only end in disappointment to you.

 No matter what you do to try to make a sandcastle remain, the end of its standing will come.  One sure thing about sandcastles is that they will fall.  If you become attached or invested you will be disappointed.  When building a sandcastle you have to work hard to get it to hold shape, but in the end you know that it will fall.  How much time are you investing into temporary structures.  Are you investing your heart, your soul and your body – then crying when the sand is heaped on the ground shapeless and void of what you have put in.  Sand doesn’t deserve this kind of time and effort with the expectation of lasting forever.  It isn’t a real structure.  It is just a replica.  Fake is never a stand-in for genuine.

3.  No matter how you try to hold onto it, it will fall and it will fail to hold its facade of a structure.

There are no safeguards to keep sand as a monument.  It is not designed to last.  It is not designed to withstand pressure.  It is not designed for forever.  When a relationship begins as heaps of sand, you can fashion it into a fake castle.  It may look grand.  People may ooh and ahh at how much it “looks like” the real thing, but you can’t wish a sandy relationship into the solid rock.  You can’t make sand reliable, unbreakable, or unchangeable.   So, as soon as you realize that what you thought could be rock is slipping through your hands, don’t hold on tighter – let go. Clap the dust of it from you hand.  The only way sand can turn into rock is by exchange, not through change.

Relationships that last are built on a firm foundation of the Rock.  When it is built on Rock it can last through rain, wind, storm, flood, EVERYTHING.  It is meant to be permanent.  Are you holding on to something temporary, pretending that it is permanent?  Can you feel the sand slipping through your fingertips, but still excusing that as an imaginary pathway to permanent?  Save the disappointment of losing your sandcastle.  Keep your heart protected from the sandstorm of lowered standards, lowered expectation, and a lowered means of living.  Stand on the solid Rock and build from there.  “On Christ the solid Rock I stand.  All other ground is sinking sand.”

PS… I love my husband’s analogies when he explains relationships.  His word pictures make it so easy to write about!

Leave a comment for us below.  Have you ever held onto a “Sandcastle Relationship”?

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