God Makes Everything Beautiful - Marnie Pohlmann

In the beginning God created. God spoke words and created what pleased Him.  I feel closest to God when I am creating with words. 

But am I creating beauty?

Writing for me has always been a cleansing process. The ink I pour onto the pages is black with pain and yes, with sin. So how can it be that my smudged black words could be anything but ugly, not offering words of beauty?

This mystery is one of those God miracles, like stifling pressure makes diamonds or sculptures change from wet clay to art in the heart of a fire. The very things that seem like they must destroy, like pressure, fire, and pain are actually used to create unique, special, beauty.

Changing pain to beauty does not always happen, and never happens easily, but this transformation is possible. God transforms my struggles to provide a new me and send me on new adventures. Like a frog stretches out legs until he can venture onto dry land, or a caterpillar sheds her creepy-crawly past to grow delicate wings for flight. So, too, God transforms my dark moments, my mistakes and failures, my defiant rebellion, into beauty. It is not something I can do. That kind of transformation is a miracle. A miracle of God. 

Do my words matter? 

In an age when definitions of words are changed by political agenda and words are not trusted to be true, what difference can be made by sharing my words? 

Writing words to sort through my sinfulness and circumstances provides clarity to me, and hopefully, when shared, encouragement to others as they read of the transformation in me.

As I settled in to write about this month’s theme of what creating beauty means to me and to my writing, I am grateful for the time we recently had travelling and camping, seeing God's words of beauty in nature. Exodus 35 says God gifted two people with many talents and they taught others to use make beauty for God's glory.  I am grateful to the Bezalels and Oholiabs in my life, most of whom are Inscribe writers, who are teaching me the art of creating beauty with words. 

I am not multi-talented like Bezalel or Oholiab. I am one of the others. I may always be one of the nameless artisans who create beautiful words, yet my few words can make a difference in God’s Temple. And if not to people who read them, the words make a difference in my own life.

God who is pleased by my act creating with words.

God is pleased that I am willing to learn to create for His glory.

I may not create beauty, but God makes all things beautiful. 

 Marnie Pohlmann works, writes, and ministers in northern British Columbia. She is learning to write words and see God make them beautiful as they are shared.