A Revolutionary Illustration

In a moment of inspiration, an illustration for spiritual growth dawned on me this morning. What will it have to do with beauty? You tell me.

Our lives are like a wing-nut (shout out to Nate by changing the graphic atop this post to the mascot of the Wichita Wingnuts) and God is like the bolt for which we were machined. The threads are God's good gifts of beauty, joy, pleasure, purpose and even physical necessities like food and oxygen. 

The world is filled with the disembodied shards of God's threads. They surround us like gnarled finger nail clippings or eraser debris. Though these things--especially in their purest state--seem vaguely to fill our voids, they stubbornly fall out and leave all humanity with a nagging sense of incompletion.

These threads are God's good gifts, and have immemorially been intended to draw us to our Maker. This can only take place when thread is joined to shaft whereby, with each revolution, we remain both filled and incrementally closer to communion withe their source. The end is to rest snugly against the one for whom we were made.

Apart from the shaft of the bolt, however, these shards can only give vague hints. When we recognize that these shards of thread find perfect continuity and purpose when joined to our Maker we begin our lifelong journey along them until we see Him face-to-face and embrace.

However, we remain dinged and flawed within. Our inner threads are jagged, mangled things; a holdover from our fallen past. We are accustomed to viewing these thread idolatrously, and habitually cling to them. Each revolution of the bolt causes us to release the previous section of thread, move along it and thus be drawn closer to our Maker. When we cannot let go of any given section, our relationship does, of necessity, stall. However, the Holy Spirit continues to exert torque on the bolt. This is His job and promise. As He does so, the thread begins to buckle and fray. The longer we cling to any one section, the more gnarled it becomes ... and we with it. 

This is a mercy of God that these threads gnarl and contort, because they can never fill us in an of themselves. The gnarling exposes this truth. Through repentance God will allow the ruined thread to give way. The revolutions can continue, we can be drawn again toward our Maker and, though it may take time for the cleaving pieces to wind their way through then out of our lives, they will eventually be purged. Our inner being, too, can be repaired, and this happens gradually through the glacial-process of each revolution--rubbing and smoothing us within.

As mentioned, the Spirit exerts a constant torque on the bolt. We, in turn, exert force on the wings through prayer, obedience, fellowship and time in the Scripture. These are external practices, which lead to internal change. Should the Spirit cease His force, our activities would merely spin the bolt in vain, but He promises never to cease His activity. Should we place no force on the wings, He, too, would merely be spinning us in vain. 

Our external pressure must be matched by an internal change--i.e. the inner yielded-ness that enables the threads to continue their process smoothly. (A misnomer, because the point of inner change is that we need it and this cannot always be a "smooth" process!)

So we see in this the dynamic the concurrent relationship between human effort and the work of the Spirit. We also see how inner change must continue if external activities are to accomplish their purposes. Without this we become what Jesus called "hypocrites"--play actors.

For what it's worth.

Selah.

Order Please!

"The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters." 

What happened next? Order. Beauty. Goodness.

Chaos is not, of itself, a thing of beauty. As I've been writing, a certain theme has emerged: the rethinking of beauty as pristine and tidy. From the beauty of my love for my daughters as evinced by the holes in my jeans to the beauty of Christ's love for his bride as evinced in his wounds, it is clear that there is a beauty in that which is tattered and rent. 

Nevertheless, these tears and tears and wounds and sorrows are an ephemeral form of beauty, save the wounds of Christ! 

Jesus' wounds accomplished a new, lasting, beautiful and good order. 

"For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross."

So beautiful! Perfect reconciliation through the brutality of the cross!

"God is not a God of disorder, but of harmony," wrote Paul. So what I'm not saying is that beauty is chaotic. "The thief comes only to kill, steal and destroy." This is a great description of chaos! "But I have come that they may have life [wholeness, healing, harmony, joy, peace, stability, friendship with our Maker] and have it to the fullest." This is a picture of great order like the Gerasene demoniac who was found "sitting at Jesus' feet, dressed and in his right mind." 

Jesus was a bringer of shalom: harmony, wholeness, peace, healing, goodness, beauty! Nevertheless, it was "by his wounds" that we were healed. 

The beauty I'm referring to in many of these posts is the beauty of wounds, tears, tears and scars that come from our putting our hands upon the chaos around us. 

Why do we wear garden gloves? When you look at a manicured yard, it is these leathery gloves which alone preserve the wholeness of the hands they are on. You might look to the left upon the garden and look to the right upon the supple hands which planted it, but there between them are the mud-caked gloves and tools that mediated the thorny, muddy, thistly reality into a beautiful, orderly one.

God's Spirit still hovers over the earth. In and through our lives he is bringing about a lasting beauty. It just so happens that we are his garden gloves.

Selah.

Life Imitating Art

Sparklers are about the least fun firework. About the only thing cool about them is the fact that they can be held. Most other stuff at the fireworks stand will blow a finger off.

Actually, there is one cool thing about sparklers. Who hasn't flicked them around like a magic wand or the baton of a symphony conductor. The incandescent brilliance of the magnesium flame is resistant what scientists call our inhibitory system. That is, it resists our brain's reflexive reset button which prevents light-stimulation from disrupting our vision. It keeps things from getting blurry by constantly receiving new stimulus and rejecting old.

Sparklers leave their wake behind them, so that when they are waved in the dark our eyes see not only their current light but its path. They remove time from the equation, if only for a fraction of a second.

I was listening to NRP today as I drove around. Today was Science Friday, and they had an illuminating (pun intended) piece on "light painting" . The light painter's brush is light. His canvas is the film of a camera, which is exposed over the course of 30 seconds. As the shutter remains open, the artist waves the lights in intricate patterns. This creates a sense of depth and a preserved picture of movement suspended in time.

This occurred to me to be a modern counterpart to the tapestry illustration. The tapestry illustration seeks to explain God's sovereignty in the midst of a chaotic world by comparing existence to a tapestry. On the back side of a tapestry we see mostly loose ends and only a simulacrum of order and beauty, but on its reverse side we see a true, intricate and beautiful masterpiece. This is said to illustrate the fact that one's perspective can prevent one from grasping the order or beauty "behind" what they are viewing. Because we are limited to a view of the back and can, in this life, only make sense of what God allows us to through his revelation (general and specific) as well as our faculties of reason and sense, we will err in our scrutiny of his work.

This is the message of Job. This is what was revealed to the prophet Isaiah:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

The poet William Cowper put it this way:

Blind unbelief is sure to err

And search his works in vain.

God is his own interpreter,

And he shall make it plain.

The segment on light painting, however, presented a new twist on the tapestry illustration: time. The comment was that these paintings are created by compressing movement into a single moment. 

Spiritual transformation is enigmatic. It seems neither linear nor cyclical. At times we feel as though we have regressed only to find that we've been in the process of a deep change. At time we feel as though we've progressed only to find that hubris and unbelief had been masked by a sense of personal success. Many times we reflect on our growth and cannot discern whether we are progressing or regressing. This, in and of itself, creates a sense of inner regression as we recall how simple things seemed in previous installments of our lives.  

As I write this I am fighting off a sickness and experiencing a prolonged season of such spiritual ambiguity. At times I suspect I am simply free-falling from whatever heights I might have once attained. When I am more lucid, it is apparent that these heights weren't always as they seemed.

God gave Paul a deeper understanding of his circumstances and struggles via his infamous "thorn in the flesh." It is clear that Paul had viewed this thorn through an entirely negative lens--pleading through 3 sustained seasons for its removal. It was God who eventually allowed Paul to see the arcs and waves of his work (over time) through this affliction.

It is as though we all have a spiritual inhibitory system. This allows the present to remain somewhat vivid, but causes the past to tell a nebulous message. What we need is to be good stewards of those challenges and personal spiritual responsibilities that lie before us, but an awareness of these unknown patterns and order--this unknown beauty of our lives--may help us remain sane. At times God may give us such insight into what this seemingly arbitrary dance is producing, but always at our disposal is truth that God is bringing order and beauty about. 

We are, you see, the light in the hand of God. Compressed in time, we might glimpse what he is doing, but, in the now, we can only strive not to obstruct the motion of his hands. 

Long before light paintings, God mentioned a similar analog:

 

The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: "Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words." So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do.

Then the word of the LORD came to me: "O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? declares the LORD. Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand.

Selah

Witnessing II

"How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news."

The Prophet Isaiah

This statement is an example of irony. 

I have a friend who is a wonderful painter and maker of furniture. His work is creative, meticulous and exquisite. His hands are gnarled, cracked, calloused. Like the lips of a jazz trumpeter or the larynx of an opera singer, our vocations brutalize. Yet the result is beauty, substance, contribution, joy, fulfillment and the like. 

These scars are physical and emotional. The Apostle Paul wrote: of "the daily pressure on me of my anxiety" for the sake of all the churches. Paul often notes the reality of his inner turmoil in heralding the good news of reconciliation with God through the atonement of Jesus. 

There is a burning friction that accompanies anything we will lay our hands and hearts upon.

Therein lies the irony of Isaiah's statement. The bringer of good news would have been one who brought it by foot. The feet of such heralds were the tools of their trade. The feet of those who brought good news would have been blistered, swollen, excoriated things. Caked in mud and filth and blood and puss, such feet would have been a ghastly, beautiful sight. 

The herald's news would, of necessity, cast a brilliant sheen upon the surface of such feet, gilding them beautifully and indelibly in the consciousness of the recipient. 

John Piper recounts a lecture he once hear J.O. Sanders give.

"He told the story of an indigneous missionary who walked barefoot from village to village preaching the gospel in India. After a long day of many miles and much discouragement he came to a certain village and tried to speak the gospel but was spurned. So he went to the edge of the village dejected and lay down under a tree and slept from exhaustion.

When he awoke the whole town was gathered to hear him. The head man of the village explained that they came to look him over while he was sleeping. When they saw his blistered feet they concluded that he must be a holy man, and that they had been evil to reject him. They were sorry and wanted to hear the message that he was willing to suffer so much to bring them."

Would that we could see the scars--within and without--
that we come by while living for the beautiful as possessing a beauty of their own. In this world of thorns, thistles, strife and cynicism, it is clear that the beauty of such scars actually surpass the more self-evident beauty of their accomplishments.

We would do well to keep in mind our peripatetic [lit. "walking around"] Lord and Savior, whose feet were swollen and filthy long before they were pierced. He "he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near". 

It would be safe to assume that if Jesus' resurrected body bore the crucifixion scars on hand and side, that his feet, too, are thus scarred for all eternity. They, too, possess a beauty which transcends the beauty of the pristine and whole.

Are your feet beautiful in this way? How about the feet of your soul? 

If not, could it be that we have never treasured the unique beauty of our Savior's feet? Should we do so, we might be found kissing them and cleansing them with our hair and tears.

"You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet."

"Leave her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me ... And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her."

More on this later.

Selah