Making the mess into something beautiful
It's been four years since I decided to tear down my kitchen wallpaper. It's white, with tiny blue dots, and big pink and brown flowers. I can't stand it. But over the years it's disappeared under a dazzling array of drawings and paintings, collages and poems created by my children, with whatever materials were handy when artistic urges struck them. There is no rhyme or reason to the pattern of colors spilling down the walls, over the calendar, around the fridge. But whenever my children come to me—faces proud and yet nervous, hands stained in bright colours —and ask, "Can we put this on the wall too?" the answer is always, "Yes, we can find a space for that."
I was feeling envious this month when talking with Tammy and Brad Snyder of Float'N'Dive scuba shop about times of total peace and prayer they've had when diving underwater. I could use some of that. To just shut off the noise and stress of life around me, and float around to the sound of nothing but my own breath.
But my computer is making funny noises today. My car needs repairs. My children's school fair needs volunteers. The bank is investigating some fraudulent withdrawals that emptied my chequing account. The stresses of life are new every morning and some days all I want is an off-switch. I'd settle for a pause button.
As Karen Stiller writes about in our Bibles Today feature, it's sometimes hard to connect with God's Word in regular and meaningful ways. We need help. Our lives need spiritual discipline, while the world keeps handing us chaos.
Still we remember the wider chaos of our world. In the stories in this issue we're reminded that children are forced into degrading and dangerous work, vulnerable people are trafficked into the sex trade, and people like The Freedom Singers are forced to flee their homelands for the sake of their faith.
Our world is a mess, and we struggle to understand it, to pray for it, to help heal it.
This morning I was thinking about "Something Beautiful" by Jars of Clay while I was pondering my kitchen walls.
"Close my eyes and hold my heart. Cover me and make me something. Change this something normal into something beautiful."
Like my children with their artwork, we come to God with our small creations, our efforts to beautiful the world, our little bits of wonder. We pray that somehow God can take what we offer, and turn it into something beautiful. That God will use our words, our prayers, our thoughts, our joys, our gifts, our works to help replace the ugliness around us with the beauty of divine creation.
That is our hope for ChristianWeek—in all its dazzling array of news, opinions, and messages from our advertising partners—that in our pages you will see something of God turning our human efforts into His beauty.
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