Accomodating the clumsy

Okay.

You’ve got until the big hand is on the 10 to answer these two questions about the pictures below.

Go.

1. True False It would be nice to be wherever these pictures were taken.

2. These pictures were most likely taken __________________ (fill in the blank).

I know what most of you put for both of those questions, without even looking at your papers. (Yes, we’ll grade them in a minute.)

For people enamored with a certain area of these United States, these images evoke a particularly beautiful place, someplace most would love to be. I know I would.

There is a gimmick of sorts to what is going on here, however.

Notice that there is something missing from these pictures, besides you knowing from whence they come.

Context. Any sort of wider scale. The answer to, “why?”.

You haven’t been given the courtesy of well, much else besides some nice* shots of nature on a ferociously windy day at the lake.

These shots probably made you think of the coasts of Maine, Nova Scotia or the state of Washington. Probably made some of you wish you were there. I’m sure some part of all of you, whatever deep place to which these images took you, appreciated some beauty therein and for a moment felt a prick! in your soul making you long to be there.

You know what?

This speaks a great deal to how we apprehend beauty in the world around us and see reason to praise our God in it. These pictures were not taken in any of those places above (and probably in none of the places you put on your papers either), yet they made you appreciate what you know of the authentic places all that much more.

Made you long for them.

Reminded you you weren’t there.

Caused you to appreciate God’s handiwork in crafting them.

Got ya thinking about how much better life could be, perhaps it even stirred hope.

The same phenomena happen when we catch little snatches of God at work in our world, be it in a friend’s faithfulness, some beautiful song, a book, our study of history, fellowship at a sporting event, or in the innocence of a niece. If we know the Authentic well, little snippets of true grace and beauty like this cause us to think of our great God and Savior and revere Him more-irregardless of context.

I promised I’d tell you the answers. The answer to #2 is that these were taken this afternoon, right here in Dallas, the 9th most populated urban area in the U.S., at White Rock Lake, a place I’ve been dozens of times. Right here in the heart of the Lone Star State, the dusty incubator of rodeos, BBQ, country music and miles upon miles of parched west Texas wasteland.

Sometimes we trip over beauty looking for the same old thing in the same old places.

Thanks be to God for how He accommodates the clumsy.

*As nice as a camera phone and my little bit of iPhoto tweaking could produce.

Number(ing) the stars

Every once in a while I slow down enough to spend some time in the DFW Metroplex’ closest approximation to ‘nature’. Tonight I tripped over that on the front porch of my apartment.

So I was lying in front of our door, iPod ablaze, front porch light disabled and the troubles of tomorrow simmering in the sea of forgetfulness.

And I just stared at the stars for a while, probably no more than twenty minutes. (I’d been meaning to do that for some time now, truth be told.)

Well, my first thought was to grouse about the lack of stars visible in the Metroplex and how happy I’d be to one day be back in Arkansas, or Colorado, or Utah, or really anywhere where stars happened to always be on tap just for me.

Once I settled though, I began to see that there were more stars than I’d seen at first. And more. And even more. I couldn’t focus in hard enough to find the ‘bottom’ of them; the harder I stared, the more triangles my eyes tried to make and the more phantom star trails I thought I saw. Reminds me of the Carol King line that James Taylor popularized, “and the stars at night/they put on a show for us/for free”. And what a show it was!

I think the questions and grounds for meditation are as infinite as the very ranks of those stars themselves, but two are settling over me:

-Upon further examination, there is always more to ____________ than what you thought at first. Always, be it the Dallas stars, the Dallas Cowboys, the Bible, or what some kid said the other day. Everything in life bears digging a little deeper, and everything yields more.

-I wonder if, the deeper one digs into that non-finite expanse of starrage, those stars grow closer together, so much closer such that outer space is no longer cold. I wonder if most things warm up the closer they get to things of similar kin. I wonder what else changes about things as they grow closer to others like them. Stars don’t move, but I sure can.

Pray with me that you’ll dim not the stars. It doesn’t take much work to see them every single day.