Sinking Stones and Sands

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

This is the second stanza from Edgar Allan Poe's A Dream Within a Dream. The reference to sand's golden grains brought back a memory. It is a tainted memory as it relates to a Japanese film that I should have never seen. Yet from that memory I have drawn one value, it was a simple comment, part of the film. That comment was something to the extent of both stone and grain of sand will equally sink in the sea if dropped there. Obviously that is not an exact or literal quote but the gist of it is in there. How often we long to hold on to things which do not belong to us. Sometimes those things are bad things, such as our sins. Our sins are buried in the pits of the deepest seas. Someone once told me that since this was the case we should not go fishing there (as we are often prone to do). But sometimes it is not sins but sacrifices. There are good things which are also washed away in the floodlike torrents of love. These good things are not ours, they do not belong to us. They are God's. Lewis spoke of it in this way, "When you are training soldiers in manoeuvres, you practise in blank ammunition because you would like them to have practise before meeting the real enemy. So we must practise in abstaining from pleasures which are not in themselves wicked. If you don't abstain from pleasure, you won't be good when the time comes along." So the point is that we must learn, like mother hens, to shoo small chicks out of our nest. We cannot hold grains of sand in our hand for too long. It's eventually futile. So if we can't hold it, then it will definitely not hold our homes or castles. Don't build on the sand. But returning from that detour let me conclude and say, along with the film, that it doesn't matter whether it be a stone or a grain of sand sometimes we ought to just let it sink.