Shunning Beauty

Walking routinely from academic hall to student center, pathway lined with magenta colored beauties waving at me as they play with the breeze, and I gaze upon them with a little smile in private thanks to their Maker. Then heart is struck by how creation is telling me what God wants me to know, and life stops for a moment to realize.



Would I deny the brilliance bursting from these rose buds that accompany me on this walk?
Would I say no to the new life they fragrantly omit?
Would I voluntarily turn the other way, shunning the vivid beauty, the birthing of a fragile, unmatched treat for my eyes?

How silly would it be if I dared not look at these flowers because of their most pleasing natural beauty?

In the same way, don't I turn from the most stunning, loveliest thing?: grace

Do I turn from grace to gaze at the death and the pain and the suffering that awaits anywhere but in that grace?
 Do I squirm and recede, flee from the delectable love, the always-filling love, the endlessly quenching love, to settle for the ice cold nothingness manifested in death's empty, poisonous lies?

This too seems silly, but it occurs more than I'd like. 

The legalism binding me to the carcass of my sin, the eating disorder that offers to become my obsession and make me loveable (though I am unimaginably loved).
 It lives in the grip I refuse to loosen while a Savior says Shackles are broken!

Shackles are broken,
but still I adorn them like jewelry.
Freedom is granted overwhelmingly,
yet I still make my home in the prison cell.

It is finished, and He didn't mean me, but in so many ways He did.

It is finished, and in those three words He declared the masterpiece of grace, the revelation, the phenomenon, the excellence that is grace, it is ready and ours for the taking.

Do I shun the beauty, or do I wholly, utterly, not reserving, thinking, considering, but just gazing at the natural beauty that is grace?!

Take it, and don't let anything fool you into taking it with half a heart, but take it all and live.