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Playing With Palettes

In many ways it made perfect sense for me to lie flat-out on the grass in the middle of the garden and look up at a sapphire-blue sky and finally understand where all the color came from. Every childhood question like “Why is the sky blue?” “Why is the grass green?” ”Why do children color every sun yellow?” was finally answered in that moment of clarity.  Ezekiel saw it… when the heavens were opened (just for him!) and he saw visions of God and high above the expanse of his vision was a throne made of……

.......Sapphire......


Why can’t the Son-light reflect off God’s throne and grace us with blue sky?  Why can’t this glorious golden-yellow light blend with sapphire-throne blue and grace us with green-grass regeneration and rebirth? Children play with school paint and crayons and learn how color mixes with color and forms dramatically different colors in a miraculous sort of way.  Why can’t God use the color of nature to show us…... 

.......Who He Is?......

Yes, it makes perfect sense; the tulip reds and rose pinks and every flowery shade in between remind me of Christ’s bloodstains on the cross.  One can take sapphire-throne blue, mix it with blood-red and get the purple hue of royalty: Jesus Christ the King of It All.  Adam and Eve saw this grace foreshadowed at Creation, the Beginning of Time, in that beautiful garden where humans fell so long ago.

And what about the death of green every autumn?  Add the golden Son-light to the red-blood and find yourself seeing the most beautiful orange, crimson, rusts and browns that take your breath away each autumn.  Death then grows dark, ugly and cold, but new life emerges every spring, in a resurrection kind of way, that mimics the Salvation Plan that God graces us with.

C.S. Lewis wrote about it:  The Inconsolable Longing that is provoked by seeing beauty in nature, by listening to beauty in symphony, by looking at beauty in works of artistic masterpiece, by reading beauty in great literature.  The beauty makes us long for the source of it all, the source of all beauty, God Himself.

That’s why we can never, ever get enough of the beauty.  It never lasts because it cannot last in a fallen world. The beauty makes us crave it in our very souls.  But God gifts us with glimpses of 

Who He Is 

every time we look out a window or walk in a garden or along a mountain trail or beside a seashore; every time we hear a symphony, sing a praise song, observe art, read a poem.

What is the purpose of it all?  He created eyes to see.  He created ears to hear and hands to touch and noses to smell and tongues to taste and see that.......

.......the Lord Is Good!......

We are fallen people living in a fallen world. God has a plan to restore relationship with Him and for those who have received this gift of Jesus Christ, His One and Only, He gives daily gifts of grace. Every breath, every heartbeat, every cell, every molecule, every moment in time is a gift of grace from the Giver and Creator of All Things.

Where is this grace when we are surrounded by evil, disaster, sadness, poverty, death? The grace is still there all around us even when life on fallen earth becomes smashed and shattered and hopeless, our Ground Zeros.
It’s not just the good times we should be thankful for.  Let’s look for grace in the heartbreaks of life. It’s there because He is there; to comfort us, to guide us, to give us peace and to let us know that the whole world is in His hands and under His ultimate control. He reminds us in His Word that it’s all part of His plan to someday restore this old broken-down earth and these broken clay-pot bodies to immortality in eternity, forever living face to face with Him! What a glorious time we will have! It’s worth the wait and it’s worth the heartbreak.  Let’s open our eyes to see it!

Why not learn to be thankful for His grace in all times, not just the good times?

Seize it, cherish it, claim it. 
Smell it, taste it, savor it.  
God is always there in the most profound ways where we would never expect it.

Oh, it all makes perfect sense…..




















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