Happy why-did-I-wake-up-early-Saturday, friends!
Is this just part of being a “certain” age? You wake up early on a planned sleep-in Saturday morning?
At least I won’t be rushed once the day’s activities get started.
On today’s agenda: birthday party for our 8 year old granddaughter, packing for 2 upcoming trips (they’re back to back), and taking 4 of our grands to see “Frozen: The Musical” at Amarillo Little Theater tonight.
And then, tomorrow is my final Sunday as interim pastor at Temple Baptist Church. It’s been a wonderful 14 months with people I’ve grown to love deeply.
When I think back over all the opportunities God has given me over 56 years of walking with Jesus, I can’t help feeling thankful, blessed, fortunate, humbled, and amazed.
This morning’s hymn text was “Something Beautiful” (Gloria Gaither, 1971).
“Something beautiful, something good; All my confusion He understood. All I had to offer Him was brokenness and strife, But He made something beautiful of my life.”
My first thought when I started looking for an image to use with those words: I need a photo of a cactus with a bloom on it.
One of my favorite things when traveling is going to botanical gardens. I’m amazed at the labor that goes into the presentation of the plants and I find myself taking hundreds of photos (that very few people ever see).
But there’s something I find even more amazing than these carefully cultivated gardens.
That’s when I’m hiking in a more desert climate (like the one where I grew up in west Texas) and I see a beautiful bloom on a prickly cactus.
I’ve been up close and personal with the thorns more often than I would like.
Not fun.
And, if I’m being honest, my natural state is pretty thorny.
I hate to burst your bubble, but so is yours.
Sorry.
God didn’t look at you or me and say, “Here’s something beautiful I can bless.”
I think it was more like, “Here’s someone I intended to be beautiful, but has been broken and distorted by sin. I can restore the beauty I intended so that the world might be blessed through his (or her) life.”
The means through which God chose to accomplish our metamorphosis is the cross of Christ.
“Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation— if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel” (Colossians 1:21-23).
New Testament scholar N.T. Wright reminds us that, on the cross, “Jesus suffers the full consequences of evil: evil from the political, social, cultural, personal, moral, religious, and spiritual angles all rolled into one.” (N.T. Wright, “Evil and the Justice of God” 2006)
My prayer for myself—and for you—is that, through our lives, people will see God’s intended beauty in the world in such a way that they’ll want to know Him personally.
Be amazing today, my friend.
