Boasting, and Beauty

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a confession to start the new year. Essentially, it boiled down to my selfishly-held ambitions and the desire to be beautiful in front of other people with the results of those ambitions. This, instead of directing God-given ambition towards pointing people into the Way of the author of Beauty.

God continues to be gracious in providing me insight into that realization of sin, and the repentance that (hopefully) follows. At times, I have hesitated even to write at all because I fear myself. But I have come to realize that even this blog can be an agent of humility if I bind it to Him.

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As the journey continues, two different authors (St. Paul and George MacDonald) provide insight into the mystery of being less than God (a la my sin and confession, corruption of Beauty) and the mystery of being created in God's very image (reflecting Beauty unruined). Here, two quotes:

1) "May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the new creation." (St. Paul, Galatians 6:14-16)


2) "'How should a man care for [fame] who knows that he is on his way to join his peers, to be a child with the great ones of the earth, the lovers of the truth, the Doers of the Will? What to him will be the wind of the world he has left behind, a wind that can not arouse the dead, that can only blow about the grave-clothes of the dead as they bury their dead?'

'Tell me then what you write for?'

'...I write because I want to tell something that makes me glad and strong. I want to say it, and so try to say it. Things come to me in gleams and flashes, sometimes in words themselves, and I want to weave them into a melodious, harmonious whole....Creation is God's self-wrought freedom. No, ma'am I do not despise my fellows, but neither do I prize the judgment of more than a few of them. I prize and love themselves, but not their opinions.'"

(George MacDonald, The Elect Lady)

The mystery of salvation and the walk with and for God is this: to boast only in what He has done while reveling in the Beauty He has placed in each of us. Just as a lover crafts a poem for his beloved, intending it for her eyes only, He puts that Beauty in us. Not so we could hold it up and say, 'Look here, world! See what I have done!' but so that we could enjoy it--enjoy Him--and in that pure enjoyment, shine.

The only pride we have is that we are nothing, and He is everything; in His grace He has given a part of that beautiful everything to us.