"We're almost there," Darren said out loud to no one in particular.

It had been a long ride. I was with Darren and his three sons on our trip to Galveston, TX. All five of us squeezed into his truck for a 6-hour trek from Fort Worth to the port city. In a few hours we would embark on a weekend cruise to Cozumel, Mexico; for now, we were on our way to a nearby hotel.

I was beyond excited. This would be the first international trip I had ever taken. It would also be my first experience on a cruise ship. But more than that, it would be my first time to see the ocean in person.

We arrived in downtown Galveston. It was a ghost town of a city at 2 AM. What I could see in the darkness fascinated me. An odd mix of the old and the new passed by. Restored manor houses and courthouses of Roman grandeur rose on one side of the street, while 24/7 gas stations and fluorescent supermarkets lined the other. Perhaps the most bizarre example was a cemetery of the 1800s positioned next to a fast food drive-thru. Old palm trees swayed in the gulf breeze, towering above flat, newly paved roads that stretched forever low into the distance.

I looked up out of the window and watched the flickering street lamps go by. There was a certain anticipation that I couldn't shake. I didn't want to see the ocean from a distance. I wanted to be right beside it when I saw it for the first time.

It was not a long wait. Darren took a right, rolled down the windows, and announced that we were by the shore.

If you're visiting the ocean for the first time, go see it at night. It seems clear and inviting in the day, sparkling in the sunshine. Not so in the dark when it transforms into a threatening majesty. The ocean becomes an elusive entity cloaked in black that roars at you to come no further. The deeper you stare into it, the more lost you become as you try and fail to discern an end to its lightless form.

I smelled and almost tasted the salty air as we drove down the road alongside the shore. The outside wind pounded against my face with almost as much fury as the water breaking onto the land. At first I couldn't look out on the ocean. Honestly, it made me afraid. Knowing that something so infinitely larger than yourself was just a few steps away was almost unbearable. I tried to close my eyes, for the darkness I would find there was much more quantifiable than the pitch black stretching out from where I was seated.

But slowly I became more at ease. Then I could even take a peek at the vast body of water. And what I saw in the nothingness of the dark night turned from fearsome into a beautiful sight.

Maybe I realized that we all have a place in this world. That there is an order to everything, whether we see it or not. Maybe I wasn't supposed to quantify the ocean or try to explain it. Maybe it was there, and I was here. I have a purpose, a point to my life, and the ocean has a purpose for its being. Maybe it has a purpose that I can't comprehend, and I have a purpose it probably wouldn't understand either. But maybe, just for a moment, I was supposed to stare into the soul of the ocean and see its beauty for what it is. Not for what I can explain, not for what I understand about it, but for what it was meant to be.

A smile spread across my face. Deep down I knew that I would never forget the first time I saw the ocean - or its simply beautiful existence.