Beauty

I can't begin to express the joy I feel when I pass bright pink and purple magnolia bushes on my way to Neville during the spring.  These flowers, somehow, lift an ungrateful, heavy spirit that accompanies me when my tired eyes can hardly stand to stay open for the last few classes of the semester.  I can't begin to express the joy I felt last Sunday, when after four stanzas of a beautiful, old hymn, the resounding sound of the organ stopped, and only the pure, worshipful chords of a congregation echoed throughout the church.  I can't begin to express the joy I feel daily from inexplicable, aesthetic gifts from a God who created beauty itself.

It's true; beauty, like all things, is created and defined by a perfect God whose mere words created the only world we know.  He not only heals and comforts our broken souls, but he does so with grace: a tender, sweet gift from which all human concept of beauty can never compare.

When God created the world in the first chapter of the Bible, He reflected on His creation and declared it good 6 times.  God's intentions for mankind's first pair was for the two to live forever in a blissful, beautiful garden.  And later, even when His created ones hurt him and His justness required for Him to punish them, even when generation after generation of Isrealites cursed the God who had delivered them from Egypt, He promised His grumbling people something better: a restoration of the same blissful, beautiful life initially enjoyed by Adam and Eve.

God manifested this beauty through Jesus Christ, a man who didn't just satisfy people's hunger or heal their disabled children, but gave them true life.  Yes, God declared, man had sinned.  Yes, God declared, because He is fair, they could not experience the same beauty from the garden without price.  But God's promise for restoration was so great that He did whatever He could for man to know Him again, even if it meant sacrificing a part of Himself.  And this perfect Christ, this promised Messiah, whose every action was the will of God, was scoffed by the very people He came to save.  He loved them anyway.  He died for them anyway.  That is a beauty I don't deserve to know.

There is a false beauty permeating the world.  Or at least girl world.  A beauty that claims that manufactured, made-over, underfed women are the closest glimpse of Eden we'll ever know.  A beauty that claims that our worth comes from a 4.0, athleticism, or the attention of men.  My friends, the beauty we are settling for is child's scribble instead of a Van Gough.  I would be lying if I said I sometimes didn't buy into this beauty myself.

But the grace of God changes people through Jesus.  "For the Lord comforts Zion.  He comforts all her waste places and makes her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord." (Is 51.3).  We don't have to strive for beauty.  We don't have to give up meals to manipulate our bodies; we don't have to give up sleep to receive a 4.0; we don't have to give up respect to get a boyfriend.  The greatest and only sacrifice needed for our satisfaction comes from God.  And it doesn't require any strife.  It comes freely.

"Come to me," Jesus whispers.  "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden; and I will give you rest."  (Matt 11.28)

In this rest, He changes our souls.    He even changes us to reflect some of the very beauty He reflects through Christ.  He transforms our visions from worldly beauty toward heavenly beauty.  We wait to see the fullness of this beauty.  But our hope is not in vain.  

Why? Because our God is not an imaginary friend.  The 66 books in the bible aren't fairy tales.  They are real, because Christ is real.  Christ died for a reason: to ransom us from our sin.  He lives now, too, because He has overcome Death.  Every day, Jesus, would your beauty be real in my heart...would you let me celebrate your beauty, not the world's beauty...would I be more overwhelmed by the beauty of Christ.