Day Nine

Day Nine // February 26 // Whatever is Lovely

“God’s finger can touch nothing but to mold it into loveliness.” – George MacDonald –

Years ago, we visited a local art museum. On the walls hung some of the greatest masters the world has ever known. There, in thick oils globbed onto timeless canvas, were landscapes and portraits and bucolic scenes of an easier time; but as we turned the corner, we entered the impressionist wing. Gone were the easily identified forms. Gone were the sensical brushstrokes. Now, we were faced with… well, I can’t be sure what we were faced with. Neither of us got it. But the room was filled. It was filled with people taking it all in, seeing in the points and dots and squiggles something that I couldn’t. Life, as in art, is all about perspective. It’s all about the lens through which we see the daily entanglements that crowd our souls within. It’s all about the way we

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think about and the filter through which we process our world.

So, what is the line that divides lovely from ugly? Is it personal taste? Or is it some fixed, unmovable, transcendent demarcation that stands with unquestionable authority? When it comes to art, I’ve been told the answer is taste. But when it comes to life – when it comes to faith – the answer is Jesus.

Jesus moves the boundary. Or maybe He becomes the boundary. What was once ugly in our lives, seen through Calvary’s redemption, gives bloom to loveliness – for it’s there that we personally experience the Creator’s touch and transformation. There, despair gives way to hope, defeat concedes to victory, tragedy becomes triumph, and death bows down to life! It’s there, in that tender crucible of salvation, that God trades beauty for ashes (Isaiah 61:3). And our eyes see the wonder-working power of the Lord. No longer do our failures get to define us as failures; they make us over-comers as we reflect upon and respond to the great love the Savior has lavished upon us (1 John 3:1).

That’s why we’re told to think on that which is lovely: because our thinking determines our actions, and our actions determine our character, and our character determines our life. That’s why we’re told to think on that which is lovely: because, when beauty breathes in our minds and souls, it need not appear anywhere else, for all of life will be seen through the wonderous lens of Beauty that died for all our ugliness!