Along with beauty, 
brokenness isn’t spoken of much either.
We’ll talk about it conceptually or in generalities, but the closer we get to specifics, the quicker we seem to want out of the conversation.
People with physical disabilities have always struck a strange chord with me. Their brokenness is so blatant and transparent for everyone to see.
Do they wish people addressed their obvious brokenness? Are they tired of people feeling sorry for them? Do they feel a nagging sense of being robbed of base level human attributes?
And then I see photos like this from the paralympics…
People competing and pursuing dreams despite their conditions…
Would you say they’re any less human? Are their lives any less fulfilling?
And just because they’ve overcome some challenges, it’s not like they are without their continued struggles, hurts, and failures
And then there’s moments of overwhelming beauty
These photos make you think twice the next time you say “I can’t…” don’t they?
Maybe life’s not about how you start the race, or even the massive stumbles along the way, but about what you do with it all, and how you finish.
Some things might be undeniably broken, but it doesn’t always have to be that way.
Top photo by funky64, the rest are from boston.com
Join the solarcrash facebook page for the next live event exploring being broken
Beauty isn’t mentioned very often within churches. Beauty is quite often pushed aside as being superficial, effeminate, fleeting, and purely aesthetic (which it can be).
But if you worship the Creator of heaven and earth, then beauty is inescapable. Christ himself is described as the ‘beautiful one’.
The word ‘glory’ is laced throughout the scriptures and carries with it the notion of the weight of beauty. Whenever the angels declare ‘glory’ to God they are proclaiming the overwhelming density and magnitude of the very source of beauty.
The scriptures go as far as saying that ‘the whole earth is filled with his glory’.
Our planet is chalked full of beauty.
If only we had eyes to see.
Coming soon: The next solarcrash event: broken-beautiful – Join our FB page, with details coming out this week. Let me know if you’d like to contribute.
Photo Credit: Runran
by Lon on January 25, 2010
Photo by Diez
Just as God has a clear bias towards the poor, the scriptures also reveal that God’s heart leans towards the city.
From Genesis God calls for humanity to be fruitful and multiply. Not simply to reproduce (otherwise Jesus would’ve done a terrible job with this mandate), but to cultivate life in the widest sense – to create culture, to steward over creation, to develop civilizations, and ultimately cities.
Even the ‘garden of eden’ carries with it the idea of a lush park by a palace. A place dense with life near a kingly residence. Seeds of a future city.
God doesn’t allow his people to remain agrarian, and calls for ‘cities of refuge‘ to be made. Cities with leadership, government, jurisdiction, so that people might find safety and progress could continue without ongoing tribal warfare.
In Jeremiah 29 God calls for his people to seek the good of the city. Not to necessarily conform to the city, or to leech off the city, but to be rooted in the city. We are to be city builders.
The Apostle Paul planted churches from city to city because he knew that if he captured the heart of the city, the gospel would flow out from the city centers into the surrounding regions. It’s interesting to note that it seems the smallest unit of the church was referred to as an entire city – ie. the church of Ephesus, Philipi, etc.
God reveals his ultimate vision for humanity in Revelation as ‘a holy city’ descending from heaven. Pieces of Eden like the tree of life and rivers are still there, but it’s wrapped up in a city filled with life. Heaven’s like an urban jungle.
I’ve always loved this quote by Ray Bakke – “If you don’t like the city, you won’t like heaven”
These are just a few snapshot thoughts that could be unpacked a lot more.
Your thoughts?
by Lon on October 5, 2009
Continuing the series of posts on U2 songs, “City of Blinding Lights” is also a favorite. It’s musically reminiscent of “Where the streets have no name” with a brilliant intro.
I think I heard Barack Obama use it as his entrance music a number of times during the campaign.
As with many u2 songs there are a number of conflicting images in the song.
A couple of simple repeated lines throughout the song, make me go hrm…
Oh you look so beautiful tonight
In the city of blinding lights
Can you see the beauty inside of me?
What happened to the beauty I had inside of me?
For some reason it makes me think of an old story I heard originally by H.G. Wells called Country of the Blind. (Doing some research on it, I realize there’s several renditions of it, below is a summary strictly from my own twisted memory).
There once was a remote city struck with a disease that caused complete blindness of all it’s inhabitants and it’s descendants.
The people eventually adapted to life being blind. It became so normal that the very concept of sight was all but forgotten after several generations had passed.
A man with perfect vision stumbles into the city. His heart breaks because he realizes an entire people group have no idea of the colors and beauty that surround them as they feel their way through the dark.
He commits himself to sharing this wonderful gift of vision he has with the people of the city.
He befriends the people and begins describing to them textures, and tints, and things in the distance. He points out beautiful features on their faces, the blues across the skies, and the yellowness of the sun.
But the people of the city think he’s gone mad as they are unable to comprehend what the man is passionately illustrating.
Having compassion, the people of the city take hold of the man, to help cure him of his illness.
And they gouge out his eyes.
I wonder if this man would be singing “Can you see the beauty inside of me? What happened to the beauty I had inside of me? ”
Ever been there? Had a spark of hope that no one understood? Saw something that was so overwhelmingly beautiful that you couldn’t put words to it, but you tried to share it anyways? Only to then have them crush it and rip it from your soul?
A heart-wrenching story coming out of Toronto. (See the Toronto Star article)
Two babies are in intensive care, one that will only survive if given a new heart; another with a strong heart, but no chance of survival.
The latter child, Kaylee, was taken off life support, so that her heart could be donated to baby Lillian. Kaylee shocks doctors as she hangs on to life, and according to hospital protocol she can no longer be a candidate for organ donation.
The longer Kaylee stays alive, the less viable her heart becomes for transplant.
Kaylee’s father is quoted as being very upset, not because his child remains alive, but because his daughter’s heart is still good, and their only comfort would be to donate it to baby Lillian who is desperately in need of a new heart.
Besides all the legal and ethical implications of all of this, a few thoughts…
What must it be like, to hope for the death of your own child, so that another might live?
What must it be like to want to give the most precious gift possible (the very heart of your own child), and not be able to do so?
When God and all his angels watched Christ die upon the cross, was there any doubt that life could only come through death?
If this transplant ever does go through, what would it be like for Kaylee’s parents, seeing that other child as they grow up? I imagine some type of deep and special connection, knowing that their dead child’s heart, remains alive beating within another little girl.
Could that be the way God the Father sees us, knowing that a part of his son and his sacrifice, beats within all of us?
by Lon on January 15, 2009
A great post by Canadian-in-exile and fellow-blogger Jake Belder:
I don’t walk much. It’s not that I don’t like to—quite the opposite, in fact. But I live in the middle of the sprawling suburbia of the Orlando metro area, and I have no motivation to walk around here.
There are a few different reasons. For one, I can walk for a mile here and feel like I haven’t gotten anywhere. Everything still looks the same—the same houses, strip malls, scattered clumps of trees. There’s no variety. It’s monotony, par excellence. It’s boring.
When I still lived in Canada, I used to love walking around the big cities. I would jump at the chance to take a walk through downtown Toronto. At one point before I moved here I had to go for an interview for a visa in Montréal. I drove up with my dad and we spent several hours just walking through the heart of the city.
Even in my hometown of Hamilton I would love to walk around. For a year, a friend of mine from school lived at the corner of Queen and Hess. Within a five minute walk of his house were numerous restaurants, coffee shops, pubs, churches, stores, and a mall. Even in the dead of winter, late at night, we would grab a cup of coffee and just walk the streets. There was life there; people, crowds, talking, laughing. Even the cars driving by felt alive.
That all goes away in suburbia. Walking a suburban street is a profoundly lonely feeling. You are often the sole person on the miles and miles of sidewalk. When there is the occasional dog-walker out there, they only go because the dog needs the walk. And even then, though it is only you and the other person in the middle of a square mile of concrete and cookie-cutter housing, you walk by with your eyes on the sidewalk or off in the opposite direction. Though cars speed past you almost endlessly, for all intents and purposes, they could be unmanned. And when they pass, the silence is louder than the noise. It is cold, heartless, empty, and lonely.
I know it’s easy to harp on the problems of suburbia, but as Christians we need to think about these things because it presents a serious challenge to us as the Church. What do we do with it? Here we see the epitome of this individualized, consumerist, and fragmented culture. When you’re out there alone walking an empty sidewalk, you feel that intensely. We’ve built it because it reflects our society’s values. But in the end we’ve built our own prison, and we willingly lock ourselves up.
Our challenge here as the Church, in principle, is no different than any other place—we are to be the incarnate presence of Jesus Christ and to make His love known to those around us. But how we are going to do this in a place that has hedged itself in with thick stone walls (both figuratively and literally) is the big challenge. For those of us that live in this context, we need to think and pray and get creative.
In Jesus we have all that is needed to build a community of love and hope amidst the emptiness of suburbia. So how can we turn that lonely walk down a concrete strip into something meaningful and alive? It will take a lot of creativity and ingenuity to work with what we have and to infuse life into what seems so lifeless, but it can be done. And this is our challenge.
