People can be so cruel and yet God can be so beautiful

"You can take one of those cell phones with the big antenna and jam it right up your a--"

"You must be the dumbest rep in that whole center. I hope that the school you're going to flunks you . . . "

"Thanks for nothing, faggot."

And that, dear friends, was what I got to put up with at work today. Calls from angry cell phone users who think that free speech and the falsity "the customer is always right" give them free reign to belittle human beings. Working in this job you get to see humanity at its worst. The deadbeats who don't pay their bills. The wives who check the records to see husbands cheating on them. The angry, bitter people who think verbal abuse is a mature way of conflict resolution.

Add to that the daily news. Soldiers who take humiliating pictures of prisoners of war. Parents who treat their children in ways that totally belies and perverts the love they should have for them. Murderers getting interviews to celebrate the tenth anniversary of their crime. A rapist basketball player who has become a hero. It's times like this I look at the people in this world and have to beg the question from God, "you died for THIS?"

I suppose I should look at my own life this way. I look at the mess I've made of things, this bundle of fears, insecurities, short fuses, stupid mistakes, and wasted chances that we call Chris and wonder why God would die for this. But the answers the same. I imagine God smiling and putting his arm around me, wiping away the dirt and grime of my sin and dressing me in His robes of righteousness and showing me my cleaned up reflection in the mirror and saying "nope, I died for THIS." God died to make sinners rigtheous. And that includes everyone who comes to saving faith in Him, no matter how grievous we might consider their offenses. The murderer, the terrorist, and the child molester. . . He beckons them all to Him because there's no stain too deep for Him to was clean.

It's the beauty and grace of God that I think we, as a church, often forget. We scour the Scriptures looking for deep theology and play proof text with passages and totally miss the sermon going on every day in front of our faces. The tears that are wiped away. The lives being changed. Sinners being made righteous and painful pasts offering glimpses of hope.

And we also miss the beauty God lavishes on us day by day. He's been so gloriously, magnificently wasteful with his creation. I sat on the porch today listening to the wind blow, feeling the sun on my skin, and just enjoying being alive, even though the first six hours of the day had been a living hell. I went to church tonight and worshiped, coming before God with other believers and acknowledging the greatness of our Lord. I went out with friends and drank deep of relationships, probably the greatest gift that God has given us humans. We aren't here to be robots. We're not here to be worker drones. We're not here to complete a duty. God gave us life so we could LIVE. Experience His mercy as we place our sins at the foot of th cross. Experience His beauty, creativity, and originality in a beautiful summer day or the way a dog looks at you with that look that just can't cause you not to smile. Experience His love and friendship in the laughs and tears of others. That's life. Life is not lived in a handbook or a sanctuary. The Christian life is lived on the stage of the world, where we flub our lines and miss our mark but have so much assurance that our Director has planned it all out. I want to close again with what Brennan Manning writes in The Ragamuffin Gospel:

So often we religious people walk amid the beauty and bounty of nature and we talk nonstop. We miss the panorama of color and sound and smell. We might as well have remained inside in our closed, artificially lit living rooms. Nature's lessons are lost and the opportunity to be wrapped in silent wonder before the God of creation passes. We fail to be stretched by the magnificence of the world saturated with grace. Creation doesn't calm our troubled spirits, restore our perspective, or delight us in every part of our being. It reminds us instead of mundane chores: changing the page on the calendar or ordering our snow tires. We must rediscover the gospel of grace and the world of grace.

C Dubbs