It was twenty-seven degrees and still this morning. After weeks of “feels like” temperatures in the teens with high winds, I was warm enough in all my layers to curl up with a blanket in the sand instead of sitting in my car between photo sessions. Kevin knew I’d had a rough week and didn’t feel like talking, so he gave me space. It had been cold, bleak, and barren for weeks.
But today, when my blue heron showed up at the jetty on the far side of the pier — after a week and a half’s absence — Kevin called across the beach to me.
Laura Joy, he’s here!
I scrambled up from the sand and made my way over, and there he was. Patient. Still. Fishing the shallows like he’d never left.
The last time I’d seen the heron was also because of Kevin. January 23rd, I’d been sitting at the wrong jetty, and Kevin called me over to the right one. He didn’t explain. He didn’t narrate. He just pointed.
Look over there.
We’re reading through John in church right now, and this morning I couldn’t stop thinking about John the Baptist. He wasn’t the Light. Scripture is clear about that. He came to testify about the Light. His whole purpose — his entire calling — was to stand at the river and point.
Behold, the Lamb of God.
Kevin isn’t my heron. He doesn’t fish. He doesn’t stand motionless in the shallows at dawn. He’s not the thing I came looking for. But twice now, on the last day I saw my heron and the first day he came back, Kevin’s role has been the same.
He’s here. Look over there.
I started thinking about who else has done that for me. Not the people who tried to be my sanctuary — but the ones who kept pointing me toward it.
I turn forty-three this week. And when I look back across every year, there are women standing at every turn, doing exactly what Kevin did from across the beach.
The Garden
Grams is always on my mind in January, especially when we get winter storms. I can still see her casket being lowered into the snow-covered ground eight years ago. I remember feeling as though we’d lost the matriarch of our family, my spirited spiritual leader and guiding moral compass.
Grams met with God in the garden. On her hands and knees, faithfully tending morning glories and snapdragons and bleeding hearts — and I mean, you can’t make up those flower names. She didn’t preach to me about showing up for God. She just showed up, every morning, in the dirt, caring for what He’d given her to tend.
I think about her when I curl up in the sand at the pier. Same posture, different garden. She taught me that God meets you where you do the work.
The Turn
My mom’s first instinct has always been prayer. Not problem-solving. Not panic. Not picking up the phone to fix things — though she does that too. Prayer first. Everything else second.
I didn’t always understand that. There were seasons I wanted her to do something, to intervene, to show up with a plan. But what she was doing was pointing. Every single time, her first move was to turn toward God and take me with her.
She taught me where to turn when everything else is spinning.
The Word
I inherited Mama Sue when my brother married her daughter. She doesn’t give advice often. This is what I love most about her. She doesn’t fill the silence with opinions or suggestions. She waits. And then, when God urges her — not before — she delivers a Word.
Not her word. His.
She’s the most John-like of all my women, if I’m honest. She doesn’t narrate or explain. She waits for the exact right moment and then calls across whatever distance separates us:
He’s here. This is what He’s saying.
I try to be like that. I don’t always succeed.
The Grace
Mama Marci is not related to me. She has no biological reason to stand by me when I mess up, when I’m hard to love, when I make choices that don’t make sense. Her son Joshua — my former beaux—has been gone a long time now. She could have let me go with him.
She didn’t.
Mama Marci stayed. Loyal and faithful, from Alabama, with no obligation and every reason to move on. She is the clearest picture of Christ that any human being has ever handed me. Unconditional love doesn’t begin to cover it. She points me to Jesus by being the kind of love that doesn’t make sense unless God is real.
The Shelter
My dear friend Mary Beth and I walk Sandy Bottom Nature Park together, and I always leave those walks feeling more energized and more renewed than I arrived. She is steady presence — the friend who matches your pace and doesn’t rush you past the hard parts.
But it’s more than walking. When I needed shelter this week, she opened her guest room door on a Monday night and didn’t ask questions. She just made space.
She taught me that sanctuary isn’t only something you seek. Sometimes it shows up with clean sheets and a quiet room and a friend who knows you don’t need words right now. You need a door that opens.
The Arrival
And then there’s Gabrielle, my sister-in-law, who texted me at 7am on the morning I needed it most. No warning. No context. Just a message landing in my phone at the exact right moment, from a woman I wasn’t expecting to hear from.
God’s timing has never been subtle with me, but sometimes He sends it through a text message on a cold morning, and you sit there in the sand realizing that sanctuary doesn’t just live in one place or one person.
It follows you.
It finds you at the pier at sunrise. It tends morning glories in your grandmother’s garden. It turns to prayer before it turns to anything else. It speaks only when the Spirit says now. It stays when it has no reason to. It opens its guest room door. It texts you at 7am.
I watched the heron fish this morning for a long time. He was patient. Still. Unbothered by the cold or the weeks he’d been away or whatever had kept him from his spot.
He just showed up, like he always does. Like they all do.
Kevin didn’t have to call across the beach to me. I might have eventually seen the heron on my own, or I might have stayed curled in the sand at the wrong jetty, looking in the wrong direction, missing him entirely.
Nevertheless, that’s what the faithful ones do. The ones who aren’t the Light but who’ve spent their whole lives testifying about it. They stand at the river, or the pier, or the end of a phone line, and they point.
Laura Joy, He’s here.
I turn forty-three this week. It has not been a gentle start.
Still, I have a heron who comes back. I have women who point. And I have a God who has never once failed to show up—even when I was curled in the sand at the wrong jetty, looking in the wrong direction.
Forty-three. I don’t know what this year holds, but I know who’s holding it. And I know that when I can’t see Him, someone faithful will call across the distance and remind me where to look.
Think that’s enough to build a year on?
Writer's Growth 