I didn’t plan it this way, but this makes three beach devotions in a row now—an unintentional trilogy—so let’s close it out with the sand dollar.
When you walk near the water’s edge at the beach, you may find one—a pale, flat, round little disc—possibly half-buried in the sand. Sand dollars belong to the same animal family as sea urchins and starfish. While living, they’re covered in tiny, velvety spines and hair-like cilia.
What you see on the shore is just the fragile skeleton left behind after the creature has died. The five-petal “flower” design on top of the sand dollar is a set of pores used for breathing.
There’s an old legend attached to this odd creature that says its markings tell the whole gospel story. The pattern on top in the shape of a star or an Easter lily recalls Christ’s birth and death. The five slits are like His wounds, and if you break open the brittle sand dollar, five tiny pieces of its jaw fall out and each piece is shaped like a dove.
The sand dollar is relatively small and easy to overlook, and that’s where we’re a lot like sand dollars. We’re fragile—genuinely fragile. It doesn’t take much to crack us—a hard conversation, a diagnosis, a loss, an ordinary day gone sideways.
Scripture even speaks to our fragility:
Psalm 103:14-16 ”For He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone….”
Job 14:1-2 “Man born of a woman is few of days and full of trouble. He comes out like a flower and withers; he flees like a shadow and continues not.”
Isaiah 40:6 “…All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.”
James 4:14 “…What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.”
We were never built to be indestructible.
But our fragility isn’t our whole story, any more than it is for the sand dollar. Maybe that’s the real legend worth keeping, not that we’re breakable, but that what’s inside us was put there for a purpose, and sometimes we have to be broken to find it.
In 2 Corinthians 12:9-10 Jesus says, “…My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness…” and Paul adds, “For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
The doves in the sand dollar aren’t decoration—they were there all along, hidden inside something small and plain, waiting for the shell to give way. And isn’t that the real gift of our fragility? We don’t have to look for cracks; life supplies plenty of those on its own.
What breaks in us isn’t the point. But every break is a chance to find out that we were never carrying ourselves in the first place—we’ve been in the hands of the Almighty all along.
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