A year ago, after a difficult season, my husband chose to renew our vows at sunrise at Fort Monroe on our first anniversary, committing anew to cherish each other in sickness and in health, until death parts us. Those vows began a honeymoon weekend where we believed we’d put the doubts and conflict behind us. We chased the sunrise in the Outer Banks, rode jet skis, parasailed, and lived the salt life.
While separating belongings this week, I found the card he’d given me that day. He wrote that he would stand by my side through our ups and downs, that he was looking forward to what our future would bring, that he was lucky to be married to me.
So much can change in a year.
This week I stood on the sand where we wed, where we renewed those vows, where we’d walked hand in hand a hundred times collecting sea glass. Because of beach erosion, you can no longer reach the seawall stairs from the sand — the steps where we shared our first kiss. You simply cannot get there anymore.
When a marriage implodes, it’s easy to rewrite the past, to spin a new narrative that makes the loss bearable. I’ve felt the pull myself. It’s harder to look honestly at what was and accept that there are some places you can never go back to. God orchestrates the tides. In the going-out and coming-in of the water and our marriage, those steps became unreachable.
When you can’t return to old places, you find new ones. I’ve started chasing the sunrise and the sunset, even made a dedicated Facebook page to share my photos. Learning to shoot manually felt like a meaningful summer hobby, a way to turn my eyes away from the family-shaped hole summer life used to be and toward creation and the Creator. Ever since school ended, I’ve let the sun bookend my days.
I’d made plans to go back to Huntington Park last night; I’d asked my friend Constantine to come this time because I hadn’t felt entirely safe after sunset last week, the first time I went there alone to photograph the light at day’s end. When it was time to go meet him, I didn’t feel like driving, didn’t feel like going at all. My brain was fixed on testifying tomorrow, and the sunset didn’t seem important.
I went anyway. Not just because I’m dedicated, but because I have learned something I trust now more than my own feelings: when I show up to chase the light, God delivers. Every time.
It was not a golden-hour evening. A thick band of clouds sat on the horizon, the sun already tucked behind it. Constantine took one look and said it wouldn’t be much of a sunset. I told him to just wait and see what the next half hour brought.
I saw her before I understood why she mattered. A woman in red was snapping photos of a couple in wedding clothes with her cell phone. I looked around for anyone with a real camera. No one. I lifted mine and caught the three of them with a family of geese wandering into the foreground.
The woman in red caught me doing it, and it almost looked like she waved me over. I went. Her name was Tiffany. She was born in Congo, raised in China, and in town from Canada. She was here for both the World Cup and her sister’s wedding. They’d thought about taking the photos on the other side of the water and settled on this beach instead.
I believe God ordained that they chose this one.
They asked if I was a photographer. I shook my head and said, “A former yearbook teacher. I know how to fill a frame.” They asked if they could pay me. I declined resolutely. We traded numbers, and I stepped into a role I know in my bones after producing twelve yearbooks… and got to put my brand-new manual skills to work.
Eight practice sessions. Had I not stood at eight sunsets fumbling with exposure and ISO, deciding for myself what the light would do, I could not have done what I did last night. The practice prepared me for a moment I didn’t know was coming.
The shoot was magical. I don’t know how you can have a feeling about someone else’s marriage, but the joy was unbridled. It was epically simple — just the two of them and the James River — and they radiated. As I shot them, I prayed God would bless their union. I sensed such contagious love I caught myself thinking, “This one will last.”
When the shoot wound down, we kept talking, and I began to remember. Vows. White dress. Rings. Flowers. Dogs in white polos.
Tiffany pulled me aside and asked what was wrong. It caught me off guard. My face must have given me away, lost somewhere two years back. Tears pricked immediately and I shook my head. She asked again. “What is wrong?” It was one of those moments when you know the person genuinely wants the answer. So, I gave her a few sentences. She’d walked through something similar; she understood.
Tiffany proceeded to wrap me in a hug, held me tight against her, and prayed over me. It was scripture-filled, quiet, and intense enough to overwhelm me. Joyful tears fell. We both knew God had aligned our lives inside this sunset.
It’s the second time in two weeks God has reached through a stranger’s arms to hold me. Two beaches, two embraces I didn’t ask for and couldn’t have arranged. I am being re-peopled by a scattered, God-sent family I am only just meeting. Given everything right now, I keep waiting to find my heart has gone bitter. It hasn’t. He hasn’t let it.
I suspected that four days ago at Fort Monroe, the bay that holds our most joyful family memories, when I almost threw my wedding band in the water.
It has lived on my right pinky since the day I forgave his unfaithfulness, where I no longer belonged to him but could not bring myself to take it off. I slid it free and turned it over in my fingers. I remembered what it stood for. I recalled the inscription inside his: AR + LJ = ∞ ♥.
I couldn’t throw it in. I was now grateful, photographing a couple at the start of their forever, that I hadn’t. To throw it would have been to dishonor something that was, for a time, real and holy. Worse, it would be to dishonor my own word, which I made before God and do not consider trivial, even now.
He may consider himself free of his vows. Mine still mean what they meant. The vows said until death parts us. It wasn’t death that parted us. It was something I never chose and couldn’t have stopped; until the law finishes what I did not begin, I will keep my word the only way left to me… by not breaking the circle myself.
There are consequences when a circle is broken. The breaking was not mine. I do not choose bitterness. I choose light and love and an impromptu photo session at Huntington Park. I’ll focus on filling the frame with whatever God puts inside it at the start and end of each day.
Constantine, it turned out, had been trying to get my attention during the sunset prayer. I’d tuned him out entirely. When I finally pulled away from Tiffany, I saw why he’d been waving: a blue heron had flown in and settled on the jetty.
My friends tease me that the heron follows me everywhere. When one flies in and lands close by, I take it as a reminder of God’s faithfulness in this solitary season. God made the heron to spend much of its life alone — waiting, holding still, patient, a creature of habit. Returning at dawn and dusk to the same shorelines, again and again.
Chasing the light. Like me.
Writer's Growth 