A Caretaker and an Ambassador by Lorilee Guenter

After a winter that seemed like it would never end, the temperatures have soared. Yards are greening up. Fruit trees are covered in a profusion of blooms. Greenhouses display flowers in every colour you can imagine. Some flowers there await the gardeners creative touch in combining them. Others fill hanging baskets and planters of all shapes and sizes.

I have been working in my yard and garden for 25 years. It continues to change and evolve. I continue to learn. The process reminds me that a lot of time, skill and care is required to create those prepared arrangements.

I have been writing for less than 25 years, except for my journals. Like my garden, my writing continues to change and evolve.  Polishing pieces into interesting poems, stories and essays takes time, skill and care.

I continue to work to learn my craft by reading, writing and attending workshops. Like Bezalel and Oholiab in Exodus 35:30-35, others have been given the ability to teach. I benefit from them sharing their skill, wisdom and knowledge.

I participate, with God, in creating beauty in my yard with and oft critical eye. I need to pause and remind myself that it is not meant to be an ongoing to-do list. It is meant to be a place I can observe a small slice of God's amazing, varied, intricate creation. He causes the flowers to bloom in their time. He has invited me in as a caretaker of this particular piece of creation.

I participate in sharing a slice of God's story, His amazing, intricate, complex story. Sometimes in my writing I become focused on what isn't finished. Here again, I am learning to pause and reflect. My words teach me as I process the wonder of the world around me. Others inform me as I contemplate the words God called them to share.

When I put down my pen, and share my writing, I trust God will cause those words to bloom. He is in control of the time and the place they grow. I am invited in as an ambassador of His story of everlasting love, mercy and grace. 

Lorilee Guenter enjoys gardening, reading and more. During the summer, her and her husband often hit the trails at nearby parks. He carries a camera. She carries a sketchbook.

Writing that Makes My Heart Hurt by Michelle Joy Teigrob

I really appreciate this month’s invitation to consider beauty and the infusion of holiness in our writing. I’ll be honest: I have tended to aim mostly for simplicity and clarity as a writer. Part of this stems from my former job in journalism, but I think I also just naturally incline towards plainness in both my life and work.

However, I was intrigued to notice my heart straining with longing as I considered how I might weave the qualities of beauty and holiness more intentionally into my writing.

Just after learning about this month’s prompt, I happened to be reading through Job 38 and 39 for my day’s devotional. “This is what beautiful, holy writing looks like!” I murmured to myself. “Of course, it’s holy,” you may be mumbling in response, “It’s Scripture.”

Would you agree, however, that there is something extra special about the words attributed to God in those chapters?

Consider even just a couple of excerpts from God’s challenge to Job:

- Have you visited the treasuries of the snow? (38:22, NLT)
- Where is the home of the east wind? (38:24b, NLT)
- Can you hold back the movements of the stars? (38:31, NLT)
- Who can tilt the water jars of heaven…? (38:37b, NLT)
- Is it at your command that the eagle rises to the heights to make its nest? It lives on the cliffs, making its home on a distant, rocky crag. (39:27)

As I read these chapters, my heart expands with longing. It is rather like homesickness, though a homesickness for something I’ve never experienced, a place I’ve never visited.

Perhaps this is what beautiful, holy writing does – it makes our hearts hurt for something more, something other, something beyond what we can pull up on our screens, pay for with a card, or otherwise instantly consume.

As I ponder all this, I feel quite inadequate to ever be capable of writing in such a way. But maybe that’s okay. Maybe the first step isn’t to go out and try my hand at it. Maybe it’s fine to simply to seek out such writing and immerse myself in it. If anyone has suggestions for books and articles that you would say exude the qualities of beauty and holiness, I would love to hear.

Blessings.


Michelle Joy Teigrob is an author, college instructor, mom of three, and wife of one. She grew up as a missionary kid in Belize, Central America, the youngest of 10 children. In addition to her twin’s death, she has since lived through the loss of two other sisters. Michelle's new book, Joyfully Star-Mapping through Life's Dung Piles, shares about her journey through her wrenching sadness. Visit www.michellejoybooks.ca to learn more.

Invisible Beauty. Tangible Beauty. Heavenly Beauty. By Peggianne Wright

"The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display his craftsmanship." (Psalm 18:1 NLT)

I believe beauty is a choice we make. But also an instinct; a subconscious reaction and shift of emotion to an external circumstance. To experience beauty is an act of faith.

Recently, as I was walking home from our community mailbox late one afternoon, I witnessed a "falling star". The split second experience made me want to tell everyone. I couldn't wait to get home to tell my husband what I'd witnessed. And yet, in this brief but beautifully mesmerizing phenomenon, I felt a warm stirring in my chest, a highly personal and private moment where I heard my own small inner voice saying, "That was God!"

The meteor I witnessed was likely hundreds of kilometers away and the object itself likely only a few centimeters in diameter. Massive yet minute. Global yet intimate. God's beauty is inexplicable and inspiring.

"O LORD, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches." (Psalm 104:24 KJV)

And just as God orchestrates a spectacular act so small and yet so enormous as to remind us that He alone is the Creator of all (Genesis 1), in that very moment it felt like His personal message was displayed for me alone and yet for the entire world simultaneously.

As a Christian writer, I bear the enormous responsibility of speaking to my audience in words that point them to our Lord in a personal way and yet in kinship as brothers and sisters of Christ. At the same time, my deep faith reminds me that the burden is not entirely my own but is borne through the guidance and collaboration of the Heavenly Father.

To a writer, words are the tools of creation. God has gifted and equipped us with the ability to inspire beauty in every keystroke. In the dark moments of a writer's life, beauty will be born through the story that leads the reader towards light and healing. Through experiences of joy and happiness, beauty is magnified and shared when a writer inspires the reader to smile and feel uplifted. Beauty is private yet public as each experience comes first from deep within a writer's heart, touched by the Holy Spirit, and then amplified to the world at large.

Beauty unfolds for the writer when a reader is moved to both share and yet personally savour our words—God's words—of meaningful inspiration and nurturing. Beauty is experienced when our messages stir a reader's sense of intimacy yet communal connection to God and His Word.

A "falling star", or meteor, is basically a piece of rock that has been flying through space for perhaps billions of years, and vapourizes with a brilliant flash upon entering earth's atmosphere. From the day of Genesis 1:1, that piece of rock was traversing throughout the galaxy waiting for its moment to blaze one dazzling moment of beauty into the sky over my tiny place on this gargantuan planet. Every moment in time is on God's schedule, unfolding at His command. The beauty within our written messages is also being formed within God's plan and being read and appreciated, reflected on and embraced at just the precise right moment for someone in our audience; His perfect timing.

Whether invisible, such as a lilac-scented spring breeze, tangible, such as a newborn fawn, or heavenly, as a miracle fulfilled, beauty is a gift that inspires our writing. When we draw from every form of God's beauty, cobble it into a collection of thoughts and reflections, and share it with others, a beautiful gift is both given and received.

“Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.” (Revelation 4:11 ESV)

Peggianne Wright is a published author and is the founder of the pet parent ministry Paws To Pray, blending her passion for the Lord and all-things-K9 to form this unique, faith-based community. Peggianne is an ardent Bible study student, devoted dog mom, wife of 44 years, and lover of music. Her blogs Spiritual Scribbles and Fur-Kid Fanatics can be found on her website www.PawsToPray.ca and you can follow her on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/PawsToPray/ and on IG @Sister_In_Prayer.

 

Even Ugly Can Become Beautiful by Bob Jones

  

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the

longing to find the place where all the

beauty came from.” C. S. Lewis

 

“God makes everything beautiful in its own time.”

(Ecclesiastes 3:11)

“What could be more beautiful than people

becoming what God intended them to be and

having some small part as a writer in

their transformation.” NJ Lindquist

You and I may disagree on what is beautiful, but we can agree there is beauty all around us. We all enjoy something pleasing to the eye. Beauty can move and convert your heart to new thought, new faith, and new horizons.

You can find beauty in writing about raising a family, making a marriage work, advancing the causes of justice, and in contexts that range from the mundane to the mysterious. Perhaps the most intriguing beauty may rise, as NJ Lindquist asserts, from some small part you play as a writer in people’s transformation.

Poetry and prose possess a beautiful quality. And even though we can’t always physically see it we know it when we feel it.

And for writers, or any creative for that matter, even ugly can become beautiful.

Start Ugly

As Jason Dauphinee points out in, 10 Uncomfortable Truths For People Who Lead With Heart,

“Never brainstorm sitting still. Start ugly. Write the bad version. Sketch the crooked line. Motion tells your nervous system you’re safe enough to wander— and that’s where the real work begins.”

Writing the "bad version" has been a fruitful writing practise for me. As well, starting with the ugly, the suffering and hardships in life, has been a way to discover beauty.

 

In Home Behind The Sun, authors Timothy Willard and Jason Locy offer a spiritually rich perspective on beauty:

“It’s easy to focus on the brokenness and miss the beauty – to get hung up on the ‘what-if’ of a situation. No matter how dark our world, no matter how many shadows cast their despair on us, beauty remains. No matter how much pain and suffering rise to conquer us, God overwhelms them, causing good to come from even the blackest circumstances.”

Take away all the colours of the rainbow and you won’t get darkness; you get pure and radiant white. No matter how hard you try to black it out, light seeps through the cracks.

Willard and Locy observe that what we see as beautiful points to something else - the thing behind “the thing." It’s not really "the thing" we desire at all. We see beauty and we long for God.

5 Observations of Beauty

1. Our souls were made to run on the practice of worship, law-keeping, truthfulness, honesty, discipline, self-control, and service to God and others, which is beauty.

2. When we live contrary to our designed purpose, we dry up and lose the capacity for beauty.

3. Beauty is in the brilliance of the everyday - in innocence, forgiveness, physicality, deformity, art, music, mathematics, relationships and more.

4. Beauty is that surprising clarity that arrests and liberates our attention, evoking awe and wonder and opening us to the eternal.

5. God is beauty and beauty is love.

 

Which observation stood out to you?

Where do you observe beauty? Please comment at the bottom of this post.

Thank you.