Archive for the ‘beautiful’ Category

Temple Building Emotions

Posted: October 13, 2015 in beautiful, god
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All Solomon’s work was carried out, from the day the foundation of the temple of the LORD was laid until its completion. So the temple of the LORD was finished.

2 Chronicles 8:16

One of the privileges I have had over the last few years is to restore and build  the REFINERY Church in Chula Vista, California. It’s been a lot of team work, a lot of stress and a lot of fun. It has also provided me some interesting emotions.

I think that I have a  sense of what Solomon must have felt when he built the temple. My team and I are building the temple, and we are building a courtyard not so different in size from what Solomon and the Jewish people constructed.

Our stone layers recently finished putting down  pavers in the walkways in our new courtyard. For an outstanding price, given because this is a church, they laid down stone pavers and stone walls with stone caps in lovely earth tones of dark brown and charcoal gray.  It’s gorgeous work, fitting for a king. We paid about $13,000. The work is worth more like $18,000, but the contractor donated to the project. Afterall, it was for God. When I stand back and look at it, I feel satisfied.

At the front ot the courtyard are two beautiful iron gates, each worth over $4000. We paid $1250 for each. The metal worker made them far beyond our expectations and beyond his too. As he began the work, using some light iron pieces, he felt that God said to him, “This isn’t good enough. For my house the metal should be the best.”

And so he put asside the iron, and selected the best he had, and built out of that. Our God is a God who calls us to art and beauty and when we create he comes along side of us and inspires greatness. I stand back and look at the gates in our church courtyard. I am very pleasantly surprised.

A friend who sells electrical lighting came by to see our work in the courtyard recently. He was thrilled, so much so that the said he wanted to help light the courtyard. He asked us to pick out the decorative lighting we wanted. We have expensive tastes. It cost almost $1,000. He picked out the LED floodlights to light it at night. He selected the best for the applicaton, then he had all the lights installed. The bill for everything came to $3,200. He paid it. I feel grateful.

Satisfied, suprised, grateful — these are temple building emotions. Solomon must have felt them. I do. So also the builders who contributed to the poject. They are good feelings.

If you want to feel these things too, then I suggest that you go build something for God.

All Praise For What Is Small!

Posted: September 15, 2015 in beautiful
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Someone once said to me, “It’s the little things that drive you crazy!”

It’s not.

It’s the little things that drive you sane — pills, pats and pets.

All praise for what is small: dollops and gobs and dabs, the edges of pie crusts, chocolate shavings.

Hail micro-sacredness of life, tiny flotsam and mini-jetsam — veins, mists, creeks, fogs.

Is it not life’s micro-detail, womp and woof of wondrous world, that moves us to gratitude?

Drops, pinches, dashes, rain, cinnamon, lotion; fermions, flounces, hadrons, hats, bosons, bacon bits, antiquarks — there is a breath-taking thereness in the smallest things.

And then at last there is the weight and force of slivered, severed time.

The massive power of one, tiny, single “was.”

The mighty microsity of one “will be.”

And the astonishing force of this quickly, quarky, snarky second’s “is.”

……

More of my soliloquies may be found a www.http://modernsoliloquies.com

Amazing!

Posted: July 18, 2015 in beautiful
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                                Amazing is your presence — after your absence.

This week NASA showed us close up images of Pluto — astonishing! I’m in love. The high ice mountains — incredible!

Last night my wife came home from a archivist conference that had her away from home for three weeks. She spent the evening unpacking, singing and humming, sitting and catching up,  surrounded by her family and her cats. This is more astonishing than Pluto.

Amazing is a presence, after an absence. It is good to come home, to Pluto, and to each other.

The cosmos is boffo ergo Io and Pluto. My wife Linda is more so.

Until recently in history, it has been rare to peek in on our solar system wonders. All hail to Galileo, Kepler, Cassini, Tombaugh.

But the rings of Saturn have been there all along.  It is not so much that they are newly astonishing as much as that we have been oldly unaware. The truth is that the extraordinary is found everywhere, in what is seen and unseen, in  a presence after an absence, in the wonder of small conveniences, in the profundity of reunions, in solar system extraordinarosities and in  the comforts of home..

Normal, ordinary, everyday, common place — these are amazing; this is known by the very sick after they recover. This is known by the traveler and by the colonizer  and by the traumatized and by the at peace. Amazing is the new normal for the newly aware. The astonishing is what is right in front of us in the gorgeously articulated super-now.

The stunning twin wonders of the body are its bright eyes. The triple gorgeousness of the person — mind, soul, body. The glory of the immediate second — that I am communicating with you.

Look up from your computer!

Behold — the amazing present!

God on Fire!

Posted: March 22, 2015 in beautiful
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Last Thursday I went out to the Anza Borrego desert.

It was on fire with bright yellow California poppies, flaming red Ocotillo, with the magenta blooms of the beaver tail cactus.

The desert floor was silver cholla, blazing in the sun, golden poppy, burning up the rocks, roaring Ocotillo, rowdy red against bright blue sky.

The fire was from God, the gold was from God, the earth and all the rich, warm, glorious colors that pop out of it after it rains — and suns — from God.

Beauty is from God. Fire, which makes gold shine, which makes it pure — also from God.

In the book of Revelation, God speaks saying, “I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself …”

God is with us — as refining fire, as beautiful fire!

Do not be afraid. His fire is a warmth, a goodness, a beauty-making thing, a white-robed, holy making thing.

We are deserts. God is rain and sun, to help us bloom, to dress us in the beauty of magenta, of golden yellow, of flaming red.

Our God is a refinery, crafting and refining beautiful lives.

Run to him, give him everything, buy the refiner’s gold, grow rich — in beauty.

Wake Me Up To Purple Faces

Posted: March 9, 2015 in beautiful
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I love to wake up.

Do you too?

I woke this morning to a dark room, the fan humming softly, the white moon setting in the west over the house, a bright butterscotch Saturn hanging over the earth, my soft, black cat waiting for me downstairs, the coffee warming the kitchen.

I woke up wanting something.

I want to see a purple face today.

I pray a simple prayer, “God I want everything you have for me in purple and orange.”

I remember catching a bluegill when I was young, it’s etched-on face looking up at me like a sunset, its purple chin looking up at me from my hand, its bright blue lines radiating past its dark eyes, its olive green body, its bright red-orange underside — gorgeous!

I loved him.

I want him.

I want to pull purple faces out of dark waters, I want to hold them, speak to them, love them, put them back, dive in, swim with them.

I want to wake up to purple faces today!

On Saturday my wife and I hiked the Guy Fleming trail at Torrey Pines State Park here in San Diego, high on the red and green cliffs hanging out in the soft Pacific breeze above the lovely glossy blue ocean.

The purple sand verbena, the orange California poppies, the olive green leaves of the lemonade berry bush — the face of the earth, my lovely bluegill, the face of my friend, the face of God, the face of everything I hope to wake up to.

The Former Glory

Posted: July 29, 2014 in beautiful
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It was disgusting.

It was beautiful, with a touch of the former glory in it.

When we pulled up the carpet in the old chapel last week, we discovered a lovely, old oak floor — coated with ugly, thick carpet glue.

Floors go through phases; this one had. When the oak was put in, it must have radiated the glossy, unmarred sheen that graces new hardwood flooring, showing off its deep, rich contrasting colors, its lovely grain, burls, knots and rays.

But then years later, when the wood had lost it’s appeal to someone, they apparently got quite excited, with the glue, and put on lots and pulled shag carpet over the fading glory.

When the chapel received its carpet, it was because it had become a worship venue for young people, excited about the Holy Spirit, living the Christian charismatic movement of the seventies, acting out a kind of Southern California, hippy-pentecostal, glory-driven, praise-infused vibe with the Holy. I know; I was in my twenties then, and I was there. I sat on that shag carpet — it was a lonely time in my life — and yet I too worshipped. It was good, that season of the church; however, it ended badly, in a relational wreck, caused by the pastor.

And now, oddly enough, forty years later, on a hot evening in July, here I was sitting on that same floor, with carpet glue all over my hands, beside my friend Glen, who had been there too. He helped put in the carpet.

The glue lay in loops and broad bands on the floor in front of us — at odds with the wood’s lines, unnaturally strewn, unhappily paired, poorly synced, at odds with the wood — a tar-based, sickly gray, denatured, skulking industrial gunk. We were there to get it off, to make the room shine again, with the former glory.

An hour earlier, I had poured Krud Kutter on the floor, a nontoxic, biodegradable multipurpose cleaner. It softened the glue, kind of, but not enough.

So following a tip for a construction guy, we poured KIngsford orderless lighter fluid on top of the glue. That worked — kind of — and turned it into something like what originally came out of the can or plastic bottle or what ever evil hole this gray-green-brown gunk oozed out of. And so, with some hard scraping and scratching, the glue came off.

Glen and I sat together and talked and scraped glue, and wiped it on the edge of a plastic bucket. Then we rubbed the residual glue off the floor with white, clean, dry clothes. The white cloths turned a nasty-looking brown.

I asked Glen about his son, who is estranged from him. There is pain there, I know, I know the story, I know the son, and I know Glen. Glen is a good dad, with some great kids and grandkids, but with this one son, there is history — relational gunk not easily scraped off.

I changed the topic. I asked him about the ultralight plane he is building. That got him talking. Glen talked about the beauty of flying. He was eloquent on lift, speed, thrust, stalls, gliding. It made me want to fly, without a license, fast, with nothing around me but a frame, and an engine with some good horsepower, and some light wings, and to take chances, and do some serious sliding, across the wind.

I asked him if he had recovered from wrecking his former ultralight plane. He had totaled his last one, hitting the top of a tree when he was trying to land, yelling “Jesus” just before he hit the ground, then driving himself home, not going to the ER until later, finding out from the scans that he was really quite smashed up. It took him months to recover. He told me there were still some aches and pains, but he was eager to get into the air again.

We scraped glue, sitting side-by-side, and poured lighter fluid, and talked on into the evening. Maybe it was the lighter fluid fumes, maybe it was the passion of two men trying to make an impossibly marred floor shine again, maybe it was the shared pain, maybe the shared vision to bring praise back to the room — maybe the old praise songs are still in the wood — maybe, maybe, maybe, but as we finished up our few feet of progress, we both felt a deep calm, and tiredness and a kind of aching peace.

And sitting, scraping, it was as if Glen and I were up in the sky together, above all the gunk and all the pain, above all the wreckage of the church and of our lives, in the ultralight, defying space and time, and the floor seemed to me like the wind, with us together, gliding over it, not alone, praising once again, flying fast now, over the glory.

Hidden Beauty!

Posted: June 11, 2014 in beautiful
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God is wasteful — with beauty.

He creates beauty, for no one to see, tossing a planet in an unknown corner of space here, a flower in an unseen field over there, a rare fish in an unreachable depth, a rare galaxy at an unthinkable distance — strewn, random, gorgeous, precious stuff (gold, diatoms, astroids and bromeliads) literally tossed everywhere across the planes and peaks and drops and seams of the universe.

We didn’t discover the rings of Saturn until Galileo spotted them in 1610 or really until Christian Huygen sorted them out in 1655. Those majestic, bright curves — so long wasted on no one.

A mile below the ocean surface lives the Viper fish, Chauliodus danae.

The deep sea vipers are hidden from us, the beautiful, iridescent green, silver and black fish with the huge, bulging eyes. On their backs they carry long dorsal spines with lights at the end called photophores to trick other creatures to come close — for dinner!

Or the corpse flower, Rafflesia arnoldii. — this rare, fascinating endangered bloom is found in the low lying tropical rainforests of Indonesia, its flower, more than a meter wide.

Most of the sea vipers and corpse flowers which have existed, strange and gorgeous and wonderful, were never seen by human eyes. In fact, more beautiful things have been not seen by us than have been seen.

Think of the universe, the vast reaches beyond our galaxy, beyond our local group, beyond our super galaxy, the billions of stars, their unseen planets, the supernovas we will never witness, the vast, lovely gas clouds, the great dark matter — all unseen.

Beauty, complexity, wonders, mysteries — never witnessed by any, but God. Why?

Because God himself — and this too has often gone unnoticed — must revel in beauty!

Where the Heck is the Glory?

Posted: December 17, 2013 in beautiful
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I’m kinda wondering where the glory is?

Luke tells us that at the Christmas event the angels sang:

“Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

Is glory in the highest?  I tend to live down among the lowest; I don’t see it all that much. Where in the heck is the promised glory?

Last Thursday night the San Diego Chargers beat the Denver Broncos! For us in San Diego, that’s a bit of glory!

Glory is defined as a high honor earned by notable achievements.

Chargers 27; Bronco’s 20 is a notable achievement. This season, the Broncos are averaging 39 points a game. San Diego held them to 20. Glory for that!

I’ve myself, have experienced similar glory to Phillip Rivers and the Chargers.

During my glory days, I won the ping pong tournament in my gym class. I’m hoping to one day be inducted into the High School Ping Pong Hall of Fame. That’s my one shot at glory.

There is a second definition of glory. Beside coming from notable achievement, glory is also marked by magnificence,  great beauty.

The sunsets this fall in San Diego have been glorious, beautiful. When I see them, I feel like I see a little sliver of the glory of God.

If you stop and think about it; there is a deep  mystery in the glory of God, because in Jesus, glory got redefined. The Bible word for exalt or glorify (doxa) actually means to lift up on high.

Glory is putting the quarterback on the teams shoulders and lifting him high.

Glory is putting the team on the podium so everyone can see them.

But for Jesus, his glory involved him coming down low, to earth as a baby,  living a lowly human life. And  If Jesus was lifted up at all on earth, it was on a cross where really he was, put down.

Christmas glory is a great reversal, a coming low, before being lifted high.

What we mean by the glory of God in Christ is this: Jesus, the humble servant, the underdog, the little baby made glory something earthly, fleshly, broken and weak. Jesus was dominated on a bloody cross in order to bring a efficacious, salvific, redemptive, glory to us.

Christ glory? It’s gory!

The movie Lone Survivor is coming out January 10. It is the story of a  gun battle, four Navy Seals fighting with the Taliban in Afganistan in June of 2005.

The lone survivor, Marcus Luttrel, eaned a Navy Cross for his actions there.

That’s glory: Never giving up; never surrendering;  the last man standing, broken body and spirit,  crawling to safety.

The same for God. God earned  his glory,  battling for us, being crushed.

Jesus earned his glory by acts of valor, in the war zone of our hearts, by being the lone survivor of death, by being a braveheart, by heroically dying for and thus saving the whole world.

But it is even deeper, with Christ, this glory thing.  God’s glory resides in his very nature. Glory, magnificence, beauty is his very character. We train glory into Navy seals. God  has always had glory, installed, within himself.

God is a kind of magnificent without doing anything.  His love, his sacrifice, his humility – it’s hard wired into him; it’s built in to him; it’s just who he is!

Cool!  Therefore, we hold God in the highest position. But weirdly he doesn’t hold on to that. He gives it away.

At Christmas, we sing, Glory to God in the highest,” but at the end of his life, Jesus? He gave his glory to us!” Where is glory? In us who believe!

John 17:20-23 This is Jesus’s high priestly prayer just before he died.

“My prayer is not for them alone. [His followers]  I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, [us] 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one…

Wow and super-wow! Jesus said he has given us, the ones who believe, the glory God gave him, in order to bring us into oneness with God.

Jesus glory is shared with us!  This is incredible.

We make it all about God, and we should, and Jesus turns around and he makes it about us too!

This isn’t taught enough.

It needs to be.

God values us, cares for us, loves us so much he gives us his honor, his reputation, his beauty, his glory!

I can relate to this. My wife, Linda, works as a university archivist.

I like telling people that. Linda is an important person. You know you are important when you tell people your title, and they say, “What?”

Archivists are the people who don’t know what you want but who know how to get it. And they like the smell of old books.

It gives me glory to be married to such a bonafide, card-carrying, record-loving, profession nerd.

Except  that our entire garage is alphabetized and stored in labeled, museum quality, acid free boxes.

In the same way, being in the family of the brilliant, intelligent, accomplished, savior Jesus,  being the sons and daughters of God, through Christ — this gives us … His  glory!

We need to hear this. Some of us tend toward saying  things like, “Oh, I’m nothing,” and think we are being humble. “Oh, I’m no big deal. I’m don’t count for much. I haven’t done anything.”

There is a huge problem with these kinds of comments. They are bad theology. When we belittle ourselvesnwe belittle what God has made and what God has redeemed

When we downplay our significance,  we downplay the glory we have inherited from Jesus!

Jesus went to war for us. He draped us in glory. We are the inheritors of his honor. We are not nobodies!

It is so hard for some of us to feel good about ourselves.

Many of us, at times, hate  ourselves, put ourselves down, punish ourselves.

Why? We have had our glory burned away by life and stolen from us by the horrible choices that we a have made and the horrific, destructive choices of  others.

Life, our reactions to it, our choices, others choices — it  has a way of making us feel ugly and small and tarnished and unimportant.

People, even family, sometimes communicate to us that we are flawed, the problem, shameful. People use us, they harm us, they burn down our  psychological flooring and the fire the very floor joists propping our psyches up.

We may have had this happen to us. We may have been  burned by someone, our mental flooring may now be damaged — unstable — but we are not burned down. We are are not nothing!

In Christ, we who believe are the children of God, charred by life’s fire perhaps but we share the glory of the father, and we also shine with a fire from above, the HS which  fills us with forgiveness,  gifts with power, destines us for eternity.

“Nothing!” No, we Christians are priests and royals, we are something very special.

Lorde, the New Zealand singer-songwriter, in her hit song “Royals,”  sings “We will never be royals,” but we who trust Christ — we already are!

Paul himself writes to us: 2 Corinthians 3:18

And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplatethe Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

Face it, accept it, revel in it , own it.  In Christ, we Christians are being transformed. We are changing for the good, we are coming alive to a new us, a new creature, a newly glorified being.

Few birds have a more striking array of plumage than the peacock, but when they are born, they are just  yellow and brown and lanky.  But God is the God who turns ugly chicks into beautiful, mature peacocks!

We can honestly, sincerely sing,  “Glory to God in the highest, because he brings glory to us in the lowest chick, and the lowest form of  us.

In Christ, God has put fancy feathers on us too .

This all true. So there is this: How do we act out our glory?

To live in glory we must never again say we are nothing. Jesus never put himself down.  We must by our wills put a stop to hating ourselves. We must not minimize our importance. We must not compare ourselves to others. We are children of God. We count. We make a difference. 

We must work hard on not putting others down. Even when we correct a child or employee, we need to find ways to give them value. We need to practice giving others credit for stuff even if it was originally our idea.  We must learn to let other people have a chance to be the star!  We must practice being like Jesus, empowering others; sharing the glory!

Lastly we must start choosing to live out our uniqueness. We must boldly begin to be who we are, in public. We must own our personalities, wear then on the outsides of ourselves, and give them. We must never  apologize for who we are, but instead be the bit of the glory of God that God has made us to be. 

Where is that glory?

It’s right here, in us!

There Now

Posted: November 11, 2013 in beautiful
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“It’s the little things that drive you crazy,” someone said to me recently.

It’s not.

It’s the little things that make you sane —  pats, pets, pills, lunch.

Today a friend of mine hugged me, my cat snoozed on my lap, I took my allergy medication (helps with the cat), I ate Fage Greek Yogurt with Mango Guanabanaso on it. Yum! The yogurt was so creamy, white and thick. When I turned the spoon upside down to coat my tongue with it, the yogurt stuck on the spoon — a Greekish, flavorish, ambrosish, mangoish, tartish, no-fat wow!

Is it not in the creamy white stuff of life, everyday’s manna, that we find reason to celebrate? Is it not in the small bits and bites of sustenance, the caloric fragments of our globe, that we are all reminded of the good that’s present here and become thankful?

A friend of mine is dying today. She’s twenty-nine. I’ve known her for a good twenty of those years. I sat with her and her mom today. We cried and laughed, hugged. Then, I went on with my day. I’m sad, it’s so broken, but life, tragic life, is still beautiful to me.

For it is in the tiny, everyday particles, the oxygen I breathe, the healthy yogurt fed bacteria in my body, the mot juste on my good friends lips —  in these that I live. I drift and anchor and float again in the micro-flotsam and mini-jetsam of life and death, and it is there that my tragic thankfulness is renewed.

We all tend to make a big deal out of big things —  the big wedding, the big pay check, the big career, big hair, big celebrities, the big life, big SUV’s, Las Vegas.

But all the big things are formed from small things, from particles, pieces, specks and micro specks. From the whale to the nit, our lives are made up like our beds, small stuff from the divine – fermions, hadrons and bosons, quarks and antiquarks.

Today I drove my daughter and her friend Steve home from the movies. Steve can’t talk, disabled from birth that way. But Steve can growl, and smile and pound my arm affectionately. So I growled at him, and he growled back, and he pounded me until I had to make the sign for “soft.”  It was good. It was some of the best communication I’ve had today — primitive, guttural, bits of phonemes, monosyllabic nonsense, cogent.  We yelled “no” to each other and laughed hilariously because we didn’t know why we were yelling “no,”  and thus it was all good, the no and yes and super-no. Steve and I hold to simple truth  — we like each other, and we talk, mostly without words.

It is in just this kind of broken, fragmented, providential reality, in the scraps, scintillas, shreds, shards and slivers which make up both life and death that we really begin to see things as they are; it is in the harboring and honoring of detail, irrational, rational, dark detail and bright detail, that we eventually have the sanity to say, “I am so thankful for such beautiful life.”

We can yell “no” all we want, and the big stuff that we don’t want to happen will still happen. But that isn’t all there is to it.

Threads, cusps, gobs, dabs, drops, edges, spots, shavings, spoonfuls —  look, don’t miss it, there, now, all around us spins the breath-taking, life-making, lift-you-up and knock-you-out-again gorgeousness of our lives.

“There now,” we sometimes say to our babies to calm them from upset.

“There, now,” I say to myself today, soothed by all the good God-given small stuff swirling ’round  my head.

Playing Small

Posted: August 22, 2013 in beautiful
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We have been encouraged not to succeed — way too often — by our society, our peers, our parents and ourselves. The democratic template has cranked out a lot of same-think, an overage of standardized emoting, too many chain-restaurant personalities. Our own dear peers have themselves under-confimed us for fear that we would rise above them. Our own parents — those over-clapping, under-raving family fans — have pinned us to overly safe and sappy schemas of success.  Even our faith has sometimes been a smack back with a rule sack and mega-moralized attack.

And then there are our own sad self-judgements, our own lists of our omissions, wantings, failures and weaknesses. The diaries of our dreams have too often gathered dust in boxes under our well-made beds. We have risen up; we have raised up, and we have grown up and  sold our ourselves too short, crafted our psyches too small and made our images too tiny. We have  miniaturized our souls  by the habitual false humilities, proudful self-negations and insecure self-critiques.  “I feel there is something special in me, but I am so …” and then follow the piled layers of self-criticism, the suffrocating toppings of self-doubt, the backward, crab-like scuttlings of self-hatred and self-assassination.

We need a dose of Marianne Williamson:

it is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world.

And “playing small” doesn’t serve you or God well either. Wise, happy, godly living is found in being all that we really are, perfect and not perfect. It is our mandate to be as light and big and bright and powerful and fun and creative and free and happy and successful at life and love and doing good as God planned us to be — planned for us even before the creation of the stars, our sun and our lovely planet. We were meant to be, all that, whether other people confirm or compliment of encourage that or not.

I beg you all, for everyone’s sake, for God sake, for your sake and for the sake of all the people who need you, walk out more, step out of your fearful self, be who you were made to be — shine, laugh, jump around, dance, throw up your hands, toss your personality into the air, release your gifts into the sky and watch the world sparkle as good rains down though the sun-lit present on you and all you love.

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