The pier is condemned. And the scene at the foot of the pier is… interesting. Police patrols. Dealers. All manner of modern American riff raff.
Let’s call the man by the stairs Jacob.
In the biblical narrative, Jacob “took one of the stones of the place, and put it under his head, and lay down in that place to sleep.”
Our Jacob sleeps with his head on the concrete.
“And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth…”
Ours is a cement stairway with metal handrails.
“and the top of it reached to heaven and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.”
And ours is the top of the pier where couples in love stand and take in the cool salt air, because when your bed is the stone of concrete wherever you lay, and you have made some bad decisions and maybe even burned some bridges with your own family so now you have nobody to help you in your loneliness, well… the gulf that stands between your sad state and that of a couple in love on a pier in the sun may as well be the chasm that separates heaven and earth themselves.
And it is the Jacob’s of the world that God chooses for the greatest things.
-Matt Beard