No song today, just thoughts...
Was leafing through this month's World Vision magazine, which featured a story on cihldren's artwork and its ability to restore imagination and provide a means of hope. I believe that is wondrously true - being able to imagine beauty is freeing.
You know what, I can't help bringing up a song here - two songs:
1) Sara Groves' "Why It Matters," which is about human-created beauty, "and its protest of the darkness and this chaos all around," and
2) A song I'm working on: here are some lyrics (a work in progress)
There is a story told throughout the world
There is a purpose; there is growth and design
There is a harmony and poetry of motion
When a flower drinks the rain and hails the sky...
He wouldn't waste beauty
If ashes were enough for us
To know Him completely
And believe in His love...
That's all for the songs. It's all connected. I was reading Psalm 8 in The Message this morning, and my imagination was captured by God's artistry.
Nursing infants gurgle choruses about you;
Toddlers shout the songs
That drown out enemy talk,
and silence atheist babble.
I look up at your macro-skies, dark and enormous,
your handmade sky-jewelry,
Moon and stars mounted in their settings.
Then I look at my micro-self and wonder,
Why do you bother with us?
Why take a second look our way?
Yet we've so narrowly missed being gods,
bright with Eden's dawn light.
You put us in charge of your handcrafted world,
repeated to us your Genesis-charge,
Made us lods of sheep and cattle,
even animals out in the wild,
Birds flying and fish swimming,
whales singing in the ocean deeps.
God, brilliant Lord,
your name echoes around the world.
I love the old English inflections Peterson adds to the poetry here - the compound nouns like "dawn light" and "Genesis-charge." Ancient-sounding, but beautiful.
I just got excited. And it's good. I know that today will be a day of taking a kid to the doctor and taking care of the other who is sick. There was lots of not-beautiful yesterday. I need the Lord to capture my imagination with His beauty this way in the morning so I will not miss it or forget it.
I hear a little one waking up at the other end of the house now. One more thought. I read this morning that an English synonym for the greek word "pistis," which is translated "faithfulness" in Galatians 5:22, is "reality." As I was thinking about moving from my morning reverie to the dailiness of life, I thought, "what is really my reality?" The word is often used to mean "dinginess." Is it possible that reality is actually much better than that?
