Beauty

It's been a while since I've cracked open the Bible. It's been sitting there on my shelf starting to attract dust. Not sure why I haven't opened it for myself in a while...only that I found the perfect spot for it in my new home. Today, I opened it to one of my favorite passages:

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

- Ecclesiastes 3:11

It's been a very difficult few months for me and my family. Over the past few nights I've had dreams of my dad...they were just conversations over dinner intermingled with memories of last year and memories of a long time ago. Gosh, I really do miss him. It's only been around 8 months since he's been gone...and it was around this time last year that we started looking for homes in the LA area. (What a futile endeavor!) I find myself often reliving the pain of his loss over and over again...I still smell what the hospital smelled like, I still remember the hugs of all the relatives, I remember the day we put him in the ground....I remember the day I looked at that chest x-ray and saw all the white...I remember the night before he went into ARDS, how I slept by his side on the make-shift cot the nurse gave me. It all happened so quickly, so suddenly...

so tragically

Everything seemed to really go down-hill from there. I lost my youth-pastoring job of 10 years because I was perceived as a threat to the organization, I had trouble with loan requirements for the new home, I was (though gracious as they were) stuck living in a 2 bedroom apartment with 4 other people, inter-family issues regarding my dad's passing began to plague our family, anger, hurt, sense of betrayal, loneliness, etc.

I've never really found it a productive pastime to sit and mope or feel sorry for myself. But for a while there, it felt like that was the only way to cope with all the crap.

It's been a crazy year to say the least. Yet, God makes everything beautiful in its time.

If there's anything my dad taught me (explicitly or otherwise), it was to really love and value life. It's what we have to enjoy--it's why we take up space and breathe our allotment of oxygen. He was a master storyteller--who's sources of ideas came only from the life he lived. I've heard funny and exciting stories from him...I've heard tragic stories...and everything in between. Life is just that...a bunch of happy and sad stories mingled together to produce a flavor of life. Sometimes sour and hard to swallow, yet sometimes so savory it takes your breath away.

I love how Erwin McManus puts it

Life is this constant tension between tragedy and beauty

It truly is. Sometimes we have power to control the tension, but for the most part we are powerless--that's where it hurts the absolute most. It hurts the most when you know the physicians are "aggressively attacking the infection, but it doesn't look promising" and you're sitting there praying for a miracle and it never comes. It hurts the most when you are injustly treated by a Pastor and are publicly embarrased by a pastor and board who never really trusted you in the first place--and you sit there wondering 'how was this fair?'. It hurts the most when you thought more people would stand up for you, but really didn't. It hurts the most when you have no idea where you're going to live in the next month.

Thank God the promise is that the pendulum of life tends to swing back to beauty...in his time. And the rest of the promise is that we really can't fathom what He's doing from beginning to end. In essence, the beauty that comes about from the tragedy is already in the making. It just takes a while for the beauty to take center stage.

And here we go. Everything happens for a reason. Everything that's tragedy becomes beauty in its place. I'm living the human experience now and in retrospect, I don't think I would have it any other way.

There are no regrets. and there are no "I wish it could've been different." Though my life has unravelled revealing the most tender, broken parts like a piece of used textile...I picture a master Tailor stitch all these together into something beautiful in his time.

How cool.