Everything I Hoped You'd Be

My friend Elizabeth shared the message below with me today.  It articulates well the place I've been living in recently: a vantage point that sees brokenness and beauty at the same time, in the same circumstances.  I often have trouble describing how I can be saddened over events in my life, frustrated by difficulties or mourning the loss of something dear, and yet still have faith that God is creating something beautiful, working everything out according to His good purpose.  This article puts words to my feelings and expresses what I've struggled to explain.

Eugene Peterson writes in the preface of his book Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places that “writing about the Christian life is like trying to paint a bird in flight. The very nature of a subject in which everything is always in motion and the context is constantly changing – rhythm of wings, sun-tinted feathers, drift of clouds (and much more) – precludes precision. Which is why definitions and explanations for the most part miss the very thing that we are interested in.” Our perspective on life, on brokenness and beauty, on God, is constant only in the fact that it is never constant. The older I get the more I realize that being overcome by brokenness and being overcome by beauty are perhaps one in the same. At the very least they are akin. They are akin in the being overcome. Both have the potential to leave us breathless and prostrate before a God that is not only larger than life but longer than life, wider, deeper. It requires depth to know height. It requires darkness to know light. All that is broken in my life has faithfully uncovered the beauty of the single unbroken Thing in my life. All that is beautiful in my life, lifted out of all that is broken, has been the resurrection of the resurrection of Christ. Both bring me to the same place. Both offer me the same hope. It’s hard to imagine that I spent so much time loathing the one and loving the other when I see so clearly now that not only do they both speak to the same End but that each requires the other in order to even have a voice in the first place. From the highest mountain of glory or from the lowest depths of despair, “it’s here that I call out, it’s here that I fall down, it’s here that I find out that You are everything I hoped You’d be.”
(http://www.bebonorman.com/2010/09/27/everything-i-hoped-youd-be-2/)