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.