Seashells and Heartbeats

Five years ago, I had an encounter with God on a beach in Hawaii. I just didn’t realize it then.

The beach was on the North Shore on Oahu and I was in the midst of a season of depression. Even though Hawaii is a literal paradise and the sunny days spent there were pure magic, there was a cloud of heaviness just weighing me down. In the midst of this internal tug of war between bliss and despondency, I listen to my friend, Nadia, excitedly share a story about this rare seashell on the island. When this seashell is found, people will create expensive jewelry pieces because they find it so beautiful and exotic. Nadia had recently moved to the island and had a desire to find one of these seashells for herself. One day she went to the beach and asked God to lead her to a seashell. That day, Nadia went home with this rare treasure and eventually had it turned into a ring which she now presented, beaming at how God had answered her simple yet vulnerable request.

As I heard her story, I felt this pang in my heart – almost a form of anguish. I longed to be seen and doted on by God in this way. Depression had fogged up my mind and heart for about a year by this point and it was hard to feel like God cared about my heart at all. So my heart fell into an apathetic numbing but at hearing Nadia’s story, a prick of hope started to wake pieces of me up. Could God do the same for me? Could He give me a rare seashell? In that moment, I knew that this superficial question covered a deeper, soul-wrenching one: Does God care about my heart?

I began to search the beach with the silent prayer on repeat in my heart. Minutes passed and I found nothing. My brother was helping me look until I finally gave up. Sadness filled my heart as I thought my question was answered with a detached “No.” Tears welled up and I ridiculed myself for caring this much over something so small. My brother hugged me and as I’m trying to hold the tears back, I cry out to God, Do You see me?

Then I hear my brother’s heart beating so loudly, it’s overpowering the sounds of the waves. I found it so strange. Almost like there was a speaker connected to his chest and I could almost feel the heartbeat mimicking my own. In that moment, I didn’t understand what He was saying, but I knew God was speaking to me. I tried to discern the message but couldn’t come up with much. The vacation ended and I went back to the mundane, this moment fading away into memory.

In May of this year, I sat at my kitchen table, spending some time with Jesus. All of the sudden, this moment on the beach comes back to my mind. I ask God, What are You trying to tell me? He says,

“Instead of a seashell, I’m offering you My heart. I long to draw you so near, you can hear My heartbeat.”

 I begin to cry as this overwhelming feeling of love takes over. How can I even embrace a love like this? A form of intimacy like this?

For months, God has been working with me on this servant posture with which I’ve approached Him for the past several years. (For more on this concept, I highly recommend John Eldredge’s book Moving Mountains.) I was challenged by the fact that in having a servant’s posture in relating to God, I was avoiding true intimacy and vulnerability. It was more a take-orders kind of relationship instead of one where I exposed my whole heart before Him and allowed Him access to even the darkest crevices. God reminded me of John 15:15, “I no longer call you servants…instead, I have called you friends.”

In a lecture by Ty Gibson, the phrase “newness of life” in Romans 6 was explained as the ability to empathize with God. Ty suggests that this is what Jesus means when He says He came to give us an “abundant life” in John 10:10 and what Paul means when he says we have been made “alive in Christ” in Ephesians 2:5. 


Why have I never thought about having empathy towards God? What makes this such a foreign concept? For most of my life, I have not seen my faith through the context of relationship.

But isn’t a deep, intimate relationship God’s main desire to have with each one of us? I’m reminded of the story of Hosea. God speaks in Hosea 2 to the people of Israel and exposes His heart by speaking of His covenant as a betrothal and saying in verse 20 that then we will “know” Him. Ty Gibson shares that the Hebrew word for “know” is yada and it refers to the knowing of the deepest relational level of intimacy. This is the same “know” as used by Jesus in his prayer for us in John 17:3, “this is eternal life, that they may know You.”

There is a quote that sums it up quite beautifully:

“It is one thing to say that God is our Friend. But it’s quite another for Him to say that we are His! If we are His friend, it means that He knows we love Him and that He can trust us with His heart.”

God’s heart’s desire is a deep level of intimacy with each one of us. We ask for blessings and He delights in giving us good things, but what He longs for most is to gift us Himself. 

I'll take His heartbeat over a seashell any day.