making something beautiful

When I first encountered the grace of God, It short-circuited my system. The concept of grace was something that I couldn’t wrap my mind around.  I wasn’t aware of it, but at the time I developed a response to it that has been driving me for most of my life.  Only now is God carefully unfolding it for me.  He has used many people and places to open me up.  I want to share it with you.

Before grace, I literally could not live with the guy who looked back at me from the mirror.  I couldn’t live with the things he told me.  I was self-destructive.  I was bent to the point of breaking under my own guilt and shame over the past.  There was no out, no escape.  I had hatred turned inside.  No one knew.  And I was convinced that no one would want to.  I had a secret.  And secrets can be deadly.

I grew up hearing about God.  I knew the old testament prophets and the new testament’s fulfillment.  Then one day at Taylor University, I called on him for myself.  I asked him to set me free of the self-hatred, to remove the shame from my life.  To rescue me from the pit that I had convinced myself was a certain end.  And to my utter astonishment, I actually believed that God loved me and accepted me.  It wasn’t a mental type of understanding.  It wasn’t something that even made sense in my thinking.  I was always the last pick for everything.  I sucked at sports.  Yeah I was a good flute player but, well, you know what people say about boy flute players.  I was always more than a little short of a full deck it seemed, always a little under par.  Why would God pick someone like that?  Why would God love someone broken?  I couldn’t figure it out.  It wasn’t something that I did in that part of my self.  Believing in God was an action, a choice that took place deep below the surface of my tempest-tossed living.  It was a fundamental shift in something… somewhere… way down there somewhere in the recesses of my soul.  In the midst of all the rejection and loathing, I was given the courage to believe that God loved me.  Period.

Now, I’m a bit of an analyst.  I’m not good at it, but I do it.  So when this shift deep in me to believe and trust God took place, all kinds of thoughts shifted from the bottom up.  When I appropriated the truth of Jesus, his sacrifice and surrender, as reconciliation for my wrong-doing, I experienced a passion I had not known.  Redemption. Without knowing the theology behind it, I knew that I had been redeemed.  It was the most beautiful thing I had ever experienced in my life. And in my estimation, it demanded a beautiful response.

This is where my artistic side took the lead.  I now had a new thought, that I was bought-back by God himself.  And I wanted to respond in a way that somehow reflected the overwhelming surge of life that was hitting my insides. I wanted to live a beautiful life for him.  I think music is beautiful.  And I can’t draw worth a hoot, so I dove into music.  I wanted my life to be a beautiful piece of music, composed out of a heart of gratitude and submission to the God who saved it.  But there was only one problem with this mission, I quickly found it impossible.

There is no way a human can capture in a chord progression or lyrical sentiment the true nature of what it means to be forgiven.  If you could somehow summarize every verse, every rhyme, every cry of every heart from everywhere and everytime in a single sound, that might come close.  But I was one man, with ten fingers on a piano and a voice that, well, wasn’t much bigger that the Who Horton heard.  I couldn’t sing beautiful enough.  I couldn’t play good enough.  I couldn’t create deep enough to provide what I was looking for: an expressional response to the grace that saved me.  The condemnation was so loud before I knew grace, that grace itself was the loudest music my heart had ever danced to.  No art I came up with could be beautiful enough to provide what I thought was a good enough reflection.  So I worked harder.  I did more.  I tried to love better, live poorer, dream bigger, and surrender it all more sacrificially so that somehow it would become my magnum opus.

And I have been trying ever since.

That is, until another shift happened.

This week I returned to the US from Tamil Nadu, India.  I can’t articulate any easier all that trip did in my spirit, my soul, my psyche than I could spell out a response back in the early days of my walk with God.  But as I sat in church this Wednesday night, I realized that I had begun a journey with God over 20 years ago that I thought would be simple and had gotten quite complicated.  I had tried to come up with a beautiful response to the beautiful gift of God’s unmerited love and acceptance and was continually falling horribly short of my goal.  Over the past two decades I had developed the unfortunate skill of finding that one misplaced spec that must be re-arranged so that a better offering could be given to God.  Problem was, I never stopped finding them.  And that thinking over the years had narrowed my vision.  I was missing the point.

There is something more beautiful than our most beautiful music.  Pick your favorite.  From Tchaikovsky to top-40 we all have that melody that lifts us, gets our feet tapping, makes us cry, whatever.  I have mine and you have yours.  Beauty is in the ear of the beholder, when it comes to music.  What I think is more beautiful, you might consider noise.  So beauty is relative to the one who is creating, or listening.  I’m getting closer to my point.

What God hit me with on Wednesday was the beauty of his grace again.  But this time in a much broader sense than my spiritual near-sightedness had taken in.  He corrected my vision a little and I saw something.  I saw the totality of God’s redeemed children singing and praising their Father and I saw its comprehensive beauty.  I became sullenly aware that though I was a part of that response, I was a tiny part.  On my own I could only respond to a part of God’s grace.  A tiny part.  But it is my part.

As we live our lives you and I are singing a song of God’s grace.  Like soloists in the choir of creation, we are only one voice.  We can join together and sing in unison the greatness of God and the Universality of forgiveness in Christ.  But we all sing a solo.  We all sound uniquely vibrant in the ears of God.  Though the harmony of heaven must make our chord progressions sound like trash cans rolling down the driveway, God still listens to the personal and private whispers of gratitude we call acts of service.  Acts that stem from a response to God’s love, mind you, not ones that are trying to earn it.

God listens to our faint whispers like they are grand and glorious, because to him they are.  It’s not the sound of them he measures, but the breath of them.  Frailty in chorus.  The sound of a thousand soloists singing out their daily lives in grace.

Our 15 bars in the orchestral symphony of God’s creation don’t last long, but they are an integral part of God’s magnum opus.  Without which the world might not even notice.  But as Creation’s Composer, he would miss the sweetness of your instrument, be it ever so brief, and the music would lose a bit of its beauty.

Loving our families.  Serving others.  Giving.  Laughing and crying.  Doing laundry and going to work.  All music in God’s grand concert.  And maybe if I begin to pay a little less attention to my part and notice how it interplays with yours, I will finally be satisfied that together we can respond to God’s beautiful gift of grace.