Thoughts For The New Year

In my estimation, two words are key for this coming year, both personally and corporately as Cornerstone.

Birth.

Beauty.

This Sunday is Vision Sunday, lots more about Birth then.

So, on to Beauty.

I'm colorblind. Have been my whole life. It makes for interesting situations, particularly in the realm of personal fashion. I can see all the colors a normal person can, I just get them mixed up. I think my parents first learned of my "condition" when I was in the first grade. Color-by-number was not my forte. So I was given one of those colorblind dot tests. If you've never seen one, you can check it out here. I only see a 25. The rest are just dots.

Here's the point: because I'm colorblind, I used to think that beauty on a visual level was something that I could not really get or create. Other vantage points like music, writing, and building stuff were all OK, but never anything like painting, photography or drawing.

There's a fundamental flaw in that mode of thinking into which even non-colorblind people step. It is an assumption that beauty is about anything other than a deeper revelation of who God is and that how I interact with beauty has something to do with whether or not something is beautiful.

Don't get me wrong, beauty is subjective -- but also objective. It is both at the same time.

Beauty is objective because God is the source of beauty. Sin, death and Satan are objectively responsible for ugly. Everything God makes is beautiful, and much of God's beauty is as terrifying and/or dark as it is comforting and/or light. For example: an animal sacrifice system, the ocean, fire, the sun, a lion, wind, dirt, caves, boulders, mountains, a Lion (repetition intended), the human brain, the human body, or His Son being tortured and murdered.

Beauty is subjective because how we interact with it is filtered through the lens of our life narrative. How we were raised, what our key temptations are, personal senses of taste, abuse we have suffered, addictions formed, people we like or dislike -- all of these things can tell us something about a beauty experience we are having.

Here's the thing I love about beauty: I don't believe it can be repressed. I believe that beauty is rooted in the character of God and everything He has made and is making bears His stamp, especially people.

About three weeks ago, I went to see Damien Rice in concert. He's one of my favorite artists. Damien is the most honestly real artist I've ever heard. He sings about torturous situations in his life, in deeply emotional, often dark ways. Every concert he releases himself to be re-tortured again. It was one of the most intense, beautiful concert experiences I've ever had. After his last song, he came out for a three song encore -- and I swear, I felt like he was trying to take the audience to a dark, depressing place and leave us there because he sang three of the darkest songs he's ever written. But he couldn't do it. God's beautiful image in Damien Rice was so strong and so real, that there was only beauty. There obviously was not a full release of the beauty that could be there because there was no Jesus in him, but Jesus was definitely there. And it was beautiful.

So, that was a long way of getting to the point that I think Jesus has a lot of beauty for us to learn and experience in 2007. I am praying God will show us more deeply what it means to worship Him "in the beauty of His holiness".

The picture at the top is the most beautiful thing in my life.