Archives For beauty

Perfect Provision, Perfect Protection

April 29, 2013

No one has to be convinced that something went wrong somewhere in the bodies and beauty department. Stand in a grocery aisle and figure out how to beat those pesky inches, woo your disinterested man, and find more perfect clothes for perfect bodies.

Something has gone wrong. So where?

It was at a tree. A food laden tree. Something good, beautiful, and delectable gone horribly wrong.

(Will Deutsch)

It began at the beginning of beginnings, Genesis, where food was made, food was eaten, and where all of our food issues began.

Strange, isn’t it, that one of our principles struggles is still there? With food?

We starve from it, binge on it, measure it out, disgust ourselves with it, pride ourselves on it, obsess over recipes, and TIVO our favorite cooking shows. Rarely do we see food as the perfect provision and perfect protection that it was designed to be. Provided for our health; protection from death.

God created food: a perfect provision for His creation. Then He clearly defined it as right or wrong: a perfect protection for his children. He set up His boundaries, endlessly good ones that felt good too, until they bumped up against the one ‘don’t’ rule: don’t eat of this tree.

Yet this is the tree from which they ate. First the woman and then the man.

Ignoring the plenty and subversively skirting the mandate by a subtle legalism, “God says don’t eat of it AND don’t touch it,” she fell the boundaries that God so lovingly placed on her and him and all of us.

Don’t we do this too? Don’t we see the plenty and choose instead the smaller portion, the lesser good? We add to the boundaries given. Sinking deeply into diets or delectable feasts, feeling helpless against the siren call that is food.

God calls out: Where are you? And we hide, behind exercise, behind enhancement, behind extra weight. We hide.

We hide because it is easier to hide than to be known. We’ve eaten off the tree of knowledge and now we think we know.

Yet still He seeks us. Pursues us. Finds us, shivering and scratching under the weight of man-made garments and expectations. I’m there. Are you too?

And all this because we added to what God said. He gave good boundaries and we made them smaller and tighter, thinking that more rules will keep us safer. God has said don’t eat of the fruit, but we think that it’s safer to just not touch it at all?

This is our great sin. This is our great fall. We add to what God has said and the boundaries become cages. We imagine He is a harsher God than He is.

We eat the fruit thinking it will make us like God and really all it does is make us into our own god. And we are powerless gods, always trying to find things to bulk us, beautify us, fix us.

All the while He is still giving perfect provision and perfect protection. The second time was in a much less beautiful environment. Dark, though midday, the place of the skull. A broken, bleeding, and bruised man. He is saying it is finished and we can hardly believe it is true.

So we are still adding to it. Principles. Practices. Helping God, we think, with clearer expectations on His people and on us. Don’t eat it, we say, or touch it. Or surely you will die.

The truth is that we are finished. Perfect in Christ’s eyes and through His provision. Nothing can be added or removed from you to make you more of who you’re intended to be in Christ.

He looks on you and sees clean, pure, perfect righteousness and beauty.

In abiding, balance, beauty, discipline, grace, identity, joy, life
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Dried Grass and Crumpled Flowers

April 24, 2013

When God knit this person together, He did so with an optimism of the best sort for everyone else and a pessimism of the worst sort for herself. If there is good to see in others, I will see it, and if there is anything out of place in me, I will caricature it until it is as ugly to the rest of the world as it is to myself. Others call this narcissism. I call it human-nature.

We’re all plagued with an evil eye toward ourselves—even if our greatest flaw is thinking the best of ourselves and the worst of others. Thinking the best of ourselves comes laden with baggage of the self-sufficient, and who needs sufficiency of self if we have not been failed by all others because of our inability to keep them satisfied? “I don’t need nobody else, just me,” is the blight of men everywhere since the enemy fell from legions of angels whose sole concern was Other Than, if only because nobody else could satisfy self like self.

There are a myriad of ways out of this navel gazing—and trust me, I’ve tried them all—but the only one that works is putting two eyes toward the cross and centering them there.

Jesus did it for the joy set before Him, though, and we do a disservice if we do anything motivated by anything other than the same joy. Too often we talk about “bearing the cross” and “picking up our cross,” and I don’t want to mislead you, making you think anything about the Christian life is anything less than a cross. It isn’t. But it is so much more than the cross—and therein lies the joy set before us.

The narcissism that keeps us desperate for the approval of man, the compliments of others, and the affirmation of the achieved, is desperately flawed in that it sets its joy on something less than eternal.

So press on, friends, for the joy set before you. Endure the cross of your ugliest aspects and the gross imperfections of others—this world is a vapor and what lasts is so much more. Treasure, too, the beauty found in others and in yourself, but do it with an eye toward the eternal where the only One we’ll be making much of is Christ.

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In beauty, glory, heaven, joy
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Polished Pearls and Unfinished Everything

April 7, 2013

I have always wanted to sell everything I own and buy the field. I have been the man who would give property, possessions, and pride to find the pearl of greatest price. A few years ago I did it. I sold everything I owned, packed what was left in my two-door Honda Civic and drove to Texas with no home, plan, or purpose. I found the pearl and nothing was worth more.

When my best friend and I were young we made for ourselves a time-capsule. We put in it special mementos, notes from boys we liked, school pictures, concert tickets—junk to anyone else. We dug a hole in her back yard and planted it deep enough to let our friendship grow. When we dug it up in our junior or senior year it was covered in dirt, crusted with mud. Inside was safe and we have continued to treasure this tradition.

I think sometimes we are caught up in the idea that our pearl will come out polished and pristine. That we will have done the work, sold our belongings, bought the field, dug down deep, and the reward is something beautiful at first sight. But dirt isn’t beautiful. And dirt-encrusted treasures are not beautiful.

The pearl we have sorted through mud and sand and tall grass and rocks for will not come out looking like it was worth any of the work at all.

There will be a time when we take the treasure home, rub it over with a soft cloth, wash it over with water, clean it up, and determine its worth. But we must not be selfish in our rush to determine the worth of what only looks like just another rock.

Today I am looking at the pile of stones before me. I asked—I asked for bread. I asked for sustenance and warm bread, and He has given me a pile of dirt-encrusted rocks. Friendships wrought with pain and surprise—not wrong, simply in process. Half-baked theological conclusions—not incorrect, simply unfinished. Relationships that never bloom—not trampled on, simply unopened. Ideas subject to time and space—not false, simply not full to fruition. To my eye this treasure has not been worth what I have given to get it.

The Lord is teaching me the process to a perfect pearl, a finely cut diamond, a shaped gold-piece, does not come without pain and it does not come without a grain of sand, a piece of rock, and a yellow vein in a dark cavern. The treasure is Christ and He wept in a garden, felt forsaken on the cross, and still has not come to take us home. We are his unfinished pearl and, in some ways, He is ours. He is already come and not yet.

Maybe none of this makes sense to you, and in some ways, I’m okay if it doesn’t. This is my unfinished treasure, covered over with mud, stuffed full of meaning for me but junk to you. We are all standing behind dark and dim glasses, waiting to see face to face our dearest Treasure, and I never want to pretend my pearls are more polished than yours until that day.

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In abiding, balance, beauty, identity, life, pride, time
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Sticky Substances and the Spirit’s Work

April 4, 2013

Two Tuesdays ago I burned myself; my hand brushed the side of the cast iron pan while my eggs sizzled and spit. I jumped back and let a loose word slip out. First instincts kicked in and I wanted to thrust my hand in a bowl of icy water but I reached for the honey instead. In my family honey was the remedy for allergies and colds, burns and cuts. We bought it by the bucket.

Gracious words, these are like the honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the bones (Prv. 16:24)

And this is what I meditate on today because my heart was burned this week. Unknowingly, unassumedly, words cursed across my heart, searing and scourging. I want to self-medicate with quick fixes or find comfort in the coldness of a hardened heart, but I reach for the honey instead.

Honey pulls the swollen skin in, keeps the bacteria out, lessens the scar, and soothes in the process.

Lord, I confess I need honey. And I need it from You. I need what is sweet to the soul and health to these bones. I have been cracked and crushed and this week I feel pressed from all sides, fearful of everyone and everything. And, Lord, I don’t understand why you use sticky substances to seal the Spirit’s work. I don’t know why what feels most natural and right, is sometimes not what is best. And, Lord, I want what is best.

And I trust you to cover me over with it, bathe me in it, and supply me with it as often as I ask.

So I’m asking.

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In abiding, beauty, identity, spiritual growth, suffering
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The Hospital

March 28, 2013

I had a conversation with a writer friend the other day and he told me the main problem with many churches these days is they’re more schools than hospitals. Which reminded me of something Jesus said once about coming for the sick and not the well.

My writer friend said we have to see a return to the spiritual, the mysterious, and the beauty of the gospel. He might not have said it like that, but as he is a writer he understands poetic license.

We’re all stumbling bumbling idiots, aren’t we? The blind leading the blind, deaf teaching the mute, and all of us trying to make sense of our sins and secrets. It makes my head hurt to think through the issues of our day, homosexuals marrying, drone strikes, economic disasters, babies—all the babies maimed in their mother’s wombs. How can any of us make sense of anything with all the world’s answers shouting so terribly loud in our faces? But how can any of us make sense of anything with us shouting so angrily at ourselves?

Once when I was small I played a game with my brother and he told me to trust him. He took my hand and led me to a dark corner of our basement and we waited there for our father to come down and turn the light on. When he did, and the wait seemed forever, my brother whispered from one to three and we bound up with the energy we’d bottled in those ten minutes hiding. I don’t think we gave my father a fright, but he pretended we did. “Oh, my,” he said, “you surprised me!” and we rushed at him and asked him over and over, “Did we, Daddy, did we?” We had to know that we had surprised him even though deep down we knew we hadn’t.

All we like sheep have gone astray, after our own way, lurking in the dark corners, all bound up in sin sickness and death. Yet all we like good and faithful servants want to come back to Jesus and ask, “Have we done well, Jesus? Have we?” because I think we so desperately want to do well. We do. We don’t want to bring our sickness to the hospital, we want to bring our strength. We don’t want to bring our weakness to the table, we want to bring our wins.

This week, all of it, all I can feel and know is the sin sickness of my heart. I need the hospital. I need to be allowed to be sick, to not bring anything to Jesus when I come but my trembling hands and my tender heart. It is Holy Week and I want to meditate on the cross, but all I am thinking about is my sin and how I feel like a bound up pile of wrong-doing and wrong-thinking and wrong-living. But I want to make sense of it. I want to see Him in it. I want to pop out of my dark dank corners and surprise Him with my goodness and faithfulness.

But He didn’t come for people like that, did He?

He came for the sick.

And we, you and me and all of us, we are so awfully, terribly, beautifully sick in need of Him.

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In balance, beauty, sin
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