“Green is a restful color,” she said. We were sitting in a kitchen in Washington, D C in the spring. The view outside, gorgeous green.
“Yes, so you might not want to do your yard back in San Diego in xeriscape,” I said. “No green, no rest — for your psyche.”
There isn’t enough anyway, anywhere, green or rest.
Our deep selves are like the seas in Albert Pinkham Rider oils that I saw in the Smithsonian Museum of American Art yesterday, all dark, tossed and stormy — threatening too. Perhaps we disapprove of ourselves and others too much.
We look through an imperfect spyglass. No inward, stormward peering eyes are 20/20. All human eyes critique, out of focus. We look out and see other people’s thunderstorms. We look in and see terrifying oceans. Better than anyone else, we see our own conflicted selves. Men in containers lost in wind-blown seas see what only the boated, angled and near-tipped selves can see — disaster coming!
Once, broken over her disabled condition, my daughter told me, “I hate myself.” We both wept. More tragicified salt water. What else was there to do?
I think God may see differently.
Perhaps we haven’t noticed but God is much less judgmental than we are. He rides the wind above our inner storms. His patience with our distubifying selfishness, greed, lust and brazen indifference is one of the the most obvious things about him.
Perfection is more relaxed with imperfection than imperfection is with itself. God looks at us, sees it all, and loves.
God sees us, within the forgiveness gifted us in Christ, as pure and good and even perfect. We have trouble agreeing with him.
But God is right about us. In Christ, riding in his sound, safe, shuttered, sea-worthy craft, the sea calms, and we rest. He places to our eye an accurate glass to look in and out at what he sees, and we see for the first time, good, in focus.
Can you be good with seeing yourself and others as good?
If so — then you too will see spring greens, and rest.
Thrive! 