success!
Hah! I finally learned how to put in links. I had to change my template to do it though, hence the new look. What do you think? It's a little pink for me, but I like it as much as any of them. Maybe sometime when I feel like messing with it, I'll figure out how to change the color scheme too. I'm going for multicolored, and none of this laid-back sage and gold and navy stuff. Yeah, someday when I'm bored.
it's true!
Can I just share this, because I’m excited about it—God’s fixing me!
I’m sure He’s been doing it for longer than I’ve been noticing it, but it still almost amazes me. For a long time there, I really couldn’t see it, wondered if He’d really do it. But He is. There’s still plenty of junk to be gotten out, plenty more of Him to be discovered. But He really and truly is opening the eyes of my understanding, renewing my mind into His mind, teaching me to know and love Him, becoming actually sweeter every day. This is for real. He really actually does this work. For some people that might seem like “duh”—of course, God sanctifies all Christians. And I know that is absolutely true. But for so long I couldn’t find it. I felt stuck, surfacey. Honestly, sometimes I still do feel that way—but more truly, I can see: He does real stuff. He’s not just in the pages of Scripture, but He’s living God at work.
And praise Him, He’s fixing me.
perhaps a contrast
Every once in a while I go back and read over some of the stuff I wrote in high school. I have one essay that’s saved in my files as “Kate’s philosophy of life.” My thinking probably seemed simplistic and naïve to anyone who read the actual title, “Life is Good.” In it was a line something like this: “Life is weird, but God is good, so life is good.” And that was that.
It’s been a few years since high school and I’m a little less naïve. The rose-colored glasses have begun to lose their tint. I’ve been forced (or graced) to see outside the little bubble that is my world the way I think it should look, the way I sometimes thought it did look. It doesn’t. I won’t pretend that I’ve seen the worst of it. But I’ve seen enough to be disillusioned. All the beauty is scarred beauty. All the love is twisted love. There is despair and disillusionment. There is turmoil of soul. There is overturning of justice. There is vanity and chasing after wind. There is shallowness and hypocrisy. There is the discovery of one’s own repulsiveness of soul.
Some of it I have only seen through the eyes of others. Some of it has become my own burden. You pessimists “Life is junk” and you cynics “Life is a façade”—you were right.
Almost. You forgot the one thing that changes everything.
God is still good.
And while the goodness of God is no excuse for my rose-colored glasses, neither is it a crutch. It is a truth whose beauty not only overwhelms all the ugliness of life but transforms it. Truth that not only has an answer for every trial but a purpose for it. Truth that transforms the corruptible into the incorruptible, the evil into righteousness, condemnation into salvation. The darkness is a reality but the goodness is a greater reality.
Neither the idealist or the cynic can deal honestly and fully with the corruption of this world. The idealist can only overlook or at best, put on a band-aid. The cynic wills to look, but distances himself by mockery. Neither the idealist nor the cynic has real hope.
But the goodness of God can look evil in the face without flinching, can put on compassion without self-protectiveness, because it overcomes. Surely and certainly, it overcomes.
I wrote about that in high school too. I wrote it theoretically then. I hadn’t experienced the darkness enough to really know. Now I write to say: It is true. All that corruption really is overflowing outside of me, inside of me. The rose-colored glasses can’t fix it. Neither can the mockery. But God is good. His goodness faced the fear and darkness inside me head-on, and overcame it by His compassion, bringing mercy and salvation through the cross. And, armed with His goodness I can turn my face to the darkness around me and fearlessly open my heart with compassion, for the goodness of God is not powerless, for He lives and His goodness is the surpassing reality that holds all the answers, all the purposes, even if they are not all revealed.
And so, I will phrase it a little differently, but I’ll say it again. Life is junk. Life is a façade. It is ugly, it is empty—almost. I think I was right in high school. God is good. Therefore, life is good.
Let us worship the goodness of God.
