Beauty

I often feel like when I try to tell people about God, when I try to explain what He’s really like, no one is interested.  No one wants that God, they want another one.  One that is friendly rather than fearsome.  One that is kind rather than crushing.  One that embodies mercy more than judgment, One that proffers grace more than accountability.  Often times, when people come face to face with the God that the Bible describes in Scripture, He seems foreign to them.  They don’t want a God Who sometimes answers a prayer for healing with continued sickness.  They don’t want a God who disciplines His creation through their circumstances.  A God Who, when we ask for faith, He gives us a trial.  When we ask for beauty, He blesses us with failure and rejection.  A God like this doesn’t make sense to most people who imagine God to be something He is not.  As I sat in my prayer chair next to my bed the other day and contemplated Who I know God to be versus what many people seem to imagine Him to be like, I wrote this poem:

I asked God to make me beautiful,

So He let me fail.

He let me sit in the darkness alone.

He let me weep in despair.

He let me wrestle dragons and stand against scorpions,

He let me cry out to Him for help.

He let me doubt and question,

He let me wallow in the depths of human ignorance.

He let me climb the peaks and suffer the valleys of human emotion.

He let me be rejected, He let me be tempted, He let me be disappointed.

He allowed me to be sifted.

Challenge after challenge, test after test, 

The waters rose until my feet could touch no more.

Then wave after wave tried to take me under,

Until at last, 

I sat on a deserted beach, 

Alone.

As water dripped from my face,

I looked up to heaven and cried out,

“Father, I prayed for You to make me beautiful!”

And He answered, 

“I did.”

Beauty in the eyes of heaven is a faith that is tried and tested, and yet endures.  Beauty in heaven is seeming defeat on earth, yet the unwillingness to let go of hope.  Beauty in heaven is tenacity in the face of relentless discouragement and persistence in the face of relentless persecution.  Beauty in heaven is running and not growing weary, it is walking and not fainting.  It is the resolve to hold onto God despite the silence, despite the shame, ridicule, rejection, fear, sorrow, and disappointment.

Beauty in heaven is a heart that has withstood the furnace of both human ruthlessness and heavenly refinement.  Because it is both the intensity of the flame and the unrelenting hammer that makes the sharpest swords.

"Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift each of you like wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith will not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers." (Luke 22:31,32)

"For I will give the command, and I will shake the people of Israel among all the nations as grain is shaken in a sieve, and not a pebble will reach the ground." (Amos 9:9)

"He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces He was despised, and we held Him in low esteem. Surely He took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered Him punished by God, stricken by Him, and afflicted. But He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on Him, and by His wounds we are healed." (Isaiah 53:2-5)