AFFIRMATIONS DIVINE

In Fireworks Part One, I mentioned that elusive link between beauty and ugly.

Whether King Solomon wondered about this link I do not know but I do know the King had some definite thoughts regarding beauty.

In Ecclesiastes 3:11 Solomon gives us these inspiring words, “He has made everything beautiful in its time.  He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end”.

Certainly God knows I need more work to reconcile the pronouncement that God made  everything beautiful in the midst of a world where people are capable of horrific ugly.

Perhaps a little perspective is in order.

The first time I heard Handel’s Messiah, not only did I think the music was ugly, I also thought it was rather boring.  My mind did not change until I learned to sing the Messiah.  After working weeks and weeks to learn the music and words,  the Messiah became the most beautiful music I’d ever heard.   When I sang the Messiah with a chorus of marvelous voices last year at Carnegie Hall, I felt for the first time how vastly beautiful heaven must be.

This past July 4 in the San Francisco Bay, I took several pictures of the fireworks.  Truth is, I’m still learning a lot about photography.  Consequently, the picture above is really strange, and yet stranger still, I kind of dig it.  Maybe that’s how God sees my progress.

In junior high school, our bible teacher explained that although we sin, God sees us in future tense, as perfect.   That’s all well and good, but the obvious part of the getting to the future means living right now.  Unfortunately my life is even less perfect than these pictures, but you know what?

These pictures are my creative expression, my experience of this time, and I actually think they’re beautiful.  Maybe not technically, just metaphorically, as they represent complicated parts of a whole.  Things are captured in these pictures, that I don’t even remember seeing.

It’s the same way with tragedy.

Frame by frame,

as the picture of our life is being developed,

beauty will be added to pain, and faith, and hope, and love,

and the end result, will be God’s own creative beauty, sparkling through us, in ways we never saw at the moment.

Even though my life is sometimes even more unsteady than the hands that hold my camera, I know in my soul, that my experience of the world, though I can not fathom it, is beautiful in it’s time.

 Understanding what’s been ordered, permitted, done by others, done by God, immediate, delayed, given, taken, is not a life requirement.  From time to time a glimpse of how all these aspects of life work together creating eternal beauty comes my way, and that’s enough for my soul to rest.

My tears, God’s triumph.  My hate, God’s forgiveness.  My fears, God’s peace.  There is a time for it all, and for that matter, we have all the time in this world, and the next world, and eternity understand it.

In a future time, I will no longer see things “out of focus”.  Perfect perspective awaits me when one day I will know as now I am known, as a beautiful creature, made by God, in this time.

Robyn