The Child on the Beach

August 22, 2025

This morning I woke early enough to catch the sunrise. I had an early appointment to receive a few bags of blood, and while waiting for the transfusion to begin, I looked out the window and watched the sky come alive in red, heavy with color, full of life.

The sun pushed its way over the horizon, slow and steady. There was something about it that felt familiar: the struggle of rising, the insistence of light breaking through. Almost as if the sun itself knew something of weariness, and yet kept going anyway.

Another transfusion. I’ve lost track of how many bags of blood I’ve received by now, each one from someone out there who chose to give a part of themselves without knowing where it would go. That thought always stops me. A stranger’s blood running into my veins, keeping me alive. A sunrise in liquid form.

As I sat there, the sun rose high enough to spill through the hospital window and rest on my skin. Its warmth spread slow and steady, like a hand laid gently across me. I closed my eyes to take it in, and for a moment, I wasn’t in that chair at all. I was a long hair boy again, running along the beach, the ocean stretching endlessly before me.

I could smell the sharp tang of salt carried on the breeze, hear the crash and hiss of waves folding back into themselves, the gulls crying overhead as if they were laughing with me. My feet slapped against wet sand, cool and smooth, while the dry grains clung between my skin and bathing suit, warm and scratchy.

The sun pressed down on my shoulders, kissed the back of my neck, ran along my spine in a golden embrace. I could even taste it, sunlight mingled with salt on my lips. My whole body hummed with the joy of being there, alive, free, unburdened.

Then, as if sensing me watching him, the boy turns toward me and smiles. It’s a knowing smile, playful, fearless, full of life. He doesn’t question the waves, the sun, or the gift of being alive in that moment. He simply trusts it, receives it, revels in it.

Back in the chair, the blood entered me with the same rhythm as the waves I’d just felt in memory. Two kinds of healing met in that moment: one delivered drop by drop from a bag overhead, the other poured out of the sky itself, wrapping me in warmth and carrying me back to a place where life felt light and limitless.

The child on the beach is still in me. His laughter, his bare feet, his face turned toward the sun. Both the blood and the light remind me he’s not gone, that I am still here, still alive, still running toward something: toward the next sunrise that will paint the sky in fire, toward the laughter of my children, and the steady love of my wife, toward the simple joy of standing in the wind without weakness, toward the promise of days not yet written. Towards God's plan for me.