I heard Lake Michigan before I saw it.
The trail through Saugatuck Dunes State Park wound beneath towering pines and dense hardwoods. The humid air settled over the forest, mosquitoes buzzed relentlessly around my ears, and unseen songbirds filled the woods with music. Somewhere overhead, squirrels chattered from branches I never managed to find.
Every few hundred yards I stopped — not because I was lost, but because the forest invited me to slow down.
A weathered bench overlooked nothing in particular. I sat anyway.
Around me, fallen trees slowly returned to the earth, nourishing the next generation of saplings. The sandy trail still held the morning’s rain. The farther I walked, the quieter I became.
Then I heard it.
At first I wasn’t certain.
A faint rhythm.
Another few steps.
Then another.
The unmistakable sound of waves gently reaching a distant shore.
The trees opened, and there it was.
Lake Michigan stretched to the horizon, its waves rolling steadily onto the beach with the same quiet rhythm I had first heard through the forest. I found a place to sit, took a few photographs, and then put the camera away. Some moments are better experienced than collected.
Earlier that morning, I had arrived a little too early for breakfast at the Blue Star Diner. At first I wondered if the restaurant had closed. Then a few pickup trucks rolled into the parking lot, and retired gentlemen began gathering outside the locked door.
No one rattled the handle.
No one looked impatient.
Everyone waited.
When the waitress unlocked the door, they drifted naturally to familiar booths and tables, as though they had been doing this together for years.
I waited.
It felt right to enter someone else’s rhythm before creating my own.
Inside, the aroma of freshly brewed coffee mingled with the aroma of bacon and sausage. One gentleman animatedly described a business deal while quieter conversations filled the rest of the room. There was laughter, good-natured teasing, and the easy comfort of people who enjoyed beginning another day together.
I wasn’t watching people eat breakfast.
I was watching community.
That spirit of welcome seemed to follow me throughout Michigan.
A few days earlier, I had attended the Taylor University Writers Conference. Walking into a room filled with Christian novelists, memoirists, poets, and writers of devotionals and Bible study guides, I wondered whether I would feel like an outsider.
Instead, every introduction began with the same simple question.
“What do you write?”
No one asked what I had done for a living.
No one questioned whether I belonged there.
They assumed I was a writer.
It didn’t seem to matter that my stories grew out of pharmacies and hospitals instead of churches and sanctuaries. They recognized the same desire to serve others through words. Before long, I no longer felt like an outsider.
I felt welcomed.
The rest of the trip quietly reinforced that feeling.
At J. Petter Galleries, McKenzie welcomed me into a world of paintings, sculpture, and Michigan wines. One whimsical painting stopped me in my tracks: a woodpecker using a telephone while another fed its young as an indignant bald eagle seemed determined to interrupt the conversation.
I smiled.
Good art has a way of making us linger.
That evening I asked to sit at the bar at Borrowed Time instead of taking a table.
Not because I needed company.
Because I wanted to leave room for conversation if it happened.
It did.
The bartender, who was also one of the owners, spoke with me about food, wine, and the restaurant they had created. A couple seated nearby shared stories of travel. I enjoyed every bite of my meal, but what I remember most are the conversations that surrounded it.
Even on the trail back from Lake Michigan, hikers stopped to ask, “How much farther?” and “Do the dunes get much steeper?”
For a few moments, I became the one giving directions.
For years, people asked me questions about medications.
That morning, they were asking about a trail.
The questions had changed.
The privilege of helping had not.
As I drove south through Michigan and into Indiana, I thought about the conversations I had enjoyed over those few days — with writers, artists, servers, fellow travelers, and strangers who had welcomed me into their small corner of the world.
The bottles of Michigan wine found their place on the kitchen counter.
Jane’s chocolates were soon tucked away.
My walking shoes went back into the closet.
The sound of Lake Michigan was harder to unpack.
I’m grateful I never will.
