A mournful ocean breeze carries salty spray over the bluff. All round, grassy fields dotted with gnarled trees and weathered buildings stretch to the horizons. Windward stands a row of trees, dark and silent as shadows. There, the ground drops away sharply to a beach hundreds of feet below.
Like a lonely sentinel looking over the sea, a deserted lookout shack valiantly juts out over the edge of the cliff. Once a snug haven for meditation and prayer, it now stands at the brink of its own death. Someday soon, the one-room structure will tumble down into the sea to be buried by the silent fog. With it, the ghosts of past decades will fall into oceans of memories to be buried by the mists of time.
The very air in the little building is thick with memories. Just looking at it and soaking in its atmosphere creates new ones. How many lives has God touched in this little room? More than can be counted.
Leaving behind initials carved in the rough wooden planks and carrying away new hope, many from a bygone era came here to seek solace from the storms of life. Now, present storms threaten the hideaway itself.
Once firm and true, still polished from the tread of many feet, the rotting boards can only offer refuge to mice, lizards, and garter snakes. One window is missing a pane of glass. A faded poster struggles to cling to the wall. For how much longer will the building continue to stand.
Someday, a child may find the piece of driftwood that was once the windowsill. He may contemplate the carvings on it and wonder where it came from, but he will never know that the words are a written legacy of a life that was changed long ago on a cliff by the sea. Others may collect driftwood for a bonfire without ever realizing that feet entering the cabin weary and leaving it refreshed polished those boards. Perhaps the next generation will construct another lookout, but it is more likely that with the passing of the old generation and building, even the memory of it will fade away. The building will collapse piece by piece, until bushes and vines have reclaimed the bare earth erasing every sign of its existence. And yet, although no formal memories of it may survive, the entire course of history has been changed by those individual souls that found healing there. Its impact may be forgotten, but never erased.