Clouds

Of all the simple pleasures, few can match the faithful and overwhelmingly majestic beauty of the cloud.

Sublime – adjective
1.
elevated or lofty in thought, language, etc.
2.
impressing the mind with a sense of grandeur or power; inspiring awe, veneration, etc.: ex. sublime skies over Wisconsin field.

Winter Sky over Wisconsin.

Deadly storm boils up over North Texas.

This one washed over us in giant undulating swells. The view from the ocean floor.

Art show above the Mountains.

Cropduster against a perfectly cloudy summer sky.

"The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork” - Psalm 19

Violent Beauty

There is a spot on State Highway 101 northwest of Fort Worth where the road runs like a spine between two quarries. I love driving along that road between the deep pits, a place where late at night you can almost smell the sweat of a thousand men. The history of the place is palpable, it's almost as if Dallas and Fort Worth were pulled whole out of the ground and plopped down 30 miles to the south and east.

A rock quarry is a violent place, the rock is blown to pieces which are then crushed in a large rotating drum, run along a belt according to size, dumped in a pile and then scooped up and dropped in a dump truck for delivery to a construction site somewhere. All of this activity creates a lot of noise, dust, and movement; non-stop movement. Dump trucks the size of houses run in perpetual motion, the belts never stop spitting out rock, and the front end loaders dance and spin (smash into the pile, reverse half circle, forward, dump, reverse, half circle forward, grab your partner do-si-do) to the chorus and hum of hungry lines of trucks and trains waiting to be filled.

But a rock quarry is also an incredibly beautiful place full of color and impressive geometry. The clean lines of the white limestone walls, the veins running at angles through the rock, the shapes of the piles, the deep blues and greens of the water in flooded pits. Then there are the deer, cattle, wild boar, goats, vultures, snakes, herons and various other crittters that make their home in hidden and long forgotten corners of the property. And all of this as sun and shadow paint their constantly evolving work across the towering rock faces. Finally, there is something timelessly beautiful about rock and when I grab a handful of it and run my thumb over the smooth surfaces I am reminded of the line from St. Patrick's Breastplate:

"I arise today
Through the strength of heaven:
Light of sun,
Radiance of moon,
Splendor of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of wind,
Depth of sea,
Stability of earth,
Firmness of rock."

Here are some pictures that will give you a glimpse into this wonderful and violent world that we get to watch unfold through the eyepiece of our lasers. Notice the deep veins running through the rock in photo #3. Photo #4 taken by Bobby Forehand.

Overflowing

"He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends his rain on the righteous and the unrighteous." - Matthew 5:45

The grace of God is everywhere and it has overtaken and consumed me. In the midst of both the ordinary and unusual pains of life, there is this joy that cannot be squelched. It is a joy that has become physical in that I feel this lightness in my chest as if my heart had wings and it is just floating around in my body, my ribs being the only thing preventing it from flying on out of here. And yet occasionally in moments of ecstasy it does escape, floating about the room and I'm forced in my mind's eye to run after it, leaping off the sofa to catch it before it becomes entangled in the ceiling fan. It is the strangest feeling, and one that has been growing in intensity over the last five years. I guess you could say that I am falling in love. God has grabbed a hold of me and I can't look away.

Life doesn't make any sense to me. I honestly can't figure it out. Part game whose rules I don't know, part random tragedy, part minor heartbreak, and all struggle from the first to the last. My perception, right or wrong, is that there are some people who have an innate knowledge of how "the game is played", some internal indicator that let's them know how to act or react in any given situation. Whether or not that is true, what is true is that I am not one of those people. I am at a complete loss as to how to move through this life with grace and effectiveness. The image that comes to mind when I think of my life and thus my relationship with God is of a rat in a flood swollen and raging river clinging to a log, scrambling, scrambling, claws extended trying deperately to keep from being ripped off and swept away.

At some point in the last five years, I finally started to get a grip on the log. The river, choked with debris and rapids is only getting worse, the bank further away, but amidst the terror, I have started to enjoy the journey. Perched precariously atop my log I have seen glimpses of beauty, perceived only from this vantage point that sustain me and give me strength for the ride.

The grace of God is the most beautiful thing in the universe and because of its beauty, it has the power to sustain and uphold. The most beautiful and powerful display of God's grace was Jesus birth, life, death and resurection. The beauty of Jesus, in principle and in reality is so powerful that it overflows and fills all of life. As I cling desperately to Christ amid the torrents of life, inwardly my soul is flooded with beauty until I find that the rat has begun to do an Irish jig atop his log, laughing and crying all at once as the waters rage.

I have never experienced a major tragedy in my life and so I'm not yet qualified to speak on that subject but I have found that throughout the minor aches and pains of life that Christ's love and grace has given me the power to move forward. His love has saved my soul, yes, but in the meantime his beauty is redeeming my life.

A red flower in the desert west of Phoenix just last week, a drop of water slowly running down the shower wall earlier this year, the rising sun exposing the flaws in a brick wall by casting a thousand tiny shadows across it's rusty red face shortly after 9/11, my daughters' two arms wrapped tight around my neck in a fierce growling hug (she doesn't hug so much as attack), the color green in a hundred hues as seen through my back door, a breeze weighted with the smell of cedar, a sip of wine, the ripple of muscle in a longhorn's side as he tries to shoo the flies away, and the trembling sound made by a guitar in that Eli Young song that took me took me far, far away. All of these and so many more are examples of the love and grace of God that overflows and spills everywhere; signposts pointing to his beauty, foretastes of the kingdom, hints of the not yet, sustenance and power for the now.

To look at me outwardly, you would not know this great symphony playing in my chest, nor would I probably suspect of you. I guess that is one of our great challenges, isn't it? How do we transfer inward realities into external momentum? The cry for help goes out again...Jeeesuuss!

"There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly. In writing those lectures and the book they later turned into, it came to seem to me that if I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace." - Frederick Buechner

Thanks, Lady Bird

The bluebonnets are back and we are loving it down here in Texas. Carpets of bluebonnets, Indian Paintbrushes and various other native wildflowers dotting the landscape along our highways and county roads make driving just about anywhere in Texas a joy this time of year. For that we can thank our former first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, a woman whose tireless efforts to promote natural beauty and conservation led to the Highway Beautification Act of 1965.

While looking at Mrs. Johnsons' website wildflower.org I ran across the following quote that I'll finish this post with - "Mrs. Johnson's concern for the environment was matched by her deep appreciation for wild America's native beauty. Her belief that beauty can bolster the spirit of a society and her determination to make the United States a more beautiful place became Lady Bird's true legacy. "Ugliness is so grim," Lady Bird Johnson once said. "A little beauty can help create harmony which will lessen tensions."

Photos taken along Interste 10 between Houston and San Antonio.

Cultivating Beauty

From Zion, perfect in beauty, God shines forth.

God calls us to both participate in and transform our culture. Amidst the moral, immoral, and amoral elements of culture all across the world God has planted divine seeds of truth that point to Him. (For example, the Passover in ancient Jewish culture preparing and pointing to Christ's death for the roughly 1,400 years preceding the actual event.) As Christians we are called to find and nurture these seeds, to help flesh them out, to allow them to grow to maturity. Because these seeds are so ingrained in the culture, and because we are in part products of our culture, when they bloom in the ways God intended, his power and love are easily perceived and comprehended. And yet because we are fallen men, these divine seeds have often been allowed to grow in barren and misguided ways. Our first impulse when we see these aberrant growths is to curse them and withdraw from the culture that produced them. But we must learn to see original intent in the twisted branches and like a great gardener or sculpter reshape and guide until beauty breaks forth. The power to transform comes first from affiliation, the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and then transcendance, we have seen His glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father full of grace and truth. We must engage in our culture, and when necessary stand in stark relief to it, steadfast like a boulder in the river.

Our culture has an insatiable appetite for beauty, the evidence for which is apparent everytime you turn on the tv or wait in line to pay for groceries. We, along with many other cultures past and present, have crossed one too many lines in our quest for temporal and quickly fading beauty. But as John Eldridge points out in his writings, desire reveals design. We have such appetites because we were created with an enormous capacity for beauty, a capacity that will never be fully realized in this life, in part because we would die on the spot if it were. God, as the psalmist said above, shines forth, perfect in beauty. This is a beauty that is expressed through His attributes, the essence of who He is, as well as the physical manifestation of His prescence (Rev 4). In the things He has created and in the hearts of those changed by His Spirit we can see muted reflections of His beauty. Because of the reflective nature of this beauty, directing men from the beginning of time to His love, we must as Christians, cultivate, protect, and champion beauty in its many forms.

From a practical standpoint this means a myriad of things I don't even pretend to know, but here are some ideas. a.) Becoming gardeners. Both my mother and mother-in-law have excelled at this and to sit in either of their yards in summer is to know that God exists. b.) By exposing both ourselves and our children to great art and timeless music. Our culture is full of mediocre expressions of both, counterfeits, that serve to conceal our hunger. As Christians we must champion and promote excellence in the arts which will only deepen and increase the hunger for eternal beauty. c.) By cooperating with the Holy Spirit as he seeks to weave compassion, grace, gratitude, and courage into the fabric of our personalities. All of the attributes of a Spirit-led life are beautiful, but these four move me when I see them expressed in others. Seeing others act in these ways compels me to respond likewise. Jesus was all these things to perfection in the most beautiful life ever lived and through His power we can faintly but powerfully echo in a way that will resonate with those searching for Him. d.) By caring for and beautifying public spaces. e.) By encouraging those who are gifted in the arts, architecture, design, city planning, etc.. to go for it with all they've got for the glory of God. f.) To look up at night, around during the day, and at our neighbor with kindness.

This is just the beginning of a thought process. I am nothing like what I aspire to be. For example, I desperately need to mow my lawn, I enjoy Will Farrell movies, and I am not very compassionate, grateful, or courageous, but a desire has been born. I want more.

The Weeders - Jules Breton