Skip to main content

the book and the beauty

Today I started another blog. Don't worry, this one will keep on chugging away, but I felt it was time to bring some fiction out of the closet and see where I can take it. I hope to post the first chapter this week so check it out if you like. The link is on the right side of this blog under My Links, aptly titled, "my book."


These are some pictures taken today in my yard. Yes, it is a dreary, cloudy rainy day, but every day, even rainy days, are beautiful. On Sunday night during worship I was reminded that there is beauty in everything that God has had a hand in creating, even if it is tainted or broken or disfigured in some way. Unfortunately, we too often subscribe to the ideas of the world around us when we think of beauty and imagine models or California beaches or movie stars and movie sunsets. I was on YouTube today and the current rage seems to be videos of models falling on the catwalk, one of them quite dramatic as she plunges through a hole in the runway. As I watched these stumbles, I thought, "The models are falling." The image that has been held up to humanity to idolise and exemplify is crumbling. And that's a good thing as I believe it to be a very limiting view of beauty. Jesus is the originator of this thing called beauty and we had better get his take on it instead of buying the ad campaign out there. Photography helps me see this beauty rain or shine, old or new, colour or black and white. Where is the beauty in your world today?

Comments

Shelley said…
yea yea. hear hear!

A couple of years ago I decided to redefine beauty in my head as "attractiveness." Beauty is that which attracts us to it. In wonder and fascination and invitation...

This has helped me out a great deal esp. with how I think of myself.

let the models fall.

Popular posts from this blog

Names of God

The Hebrew word "YHWH" (read from right to left) This past Sunday I gave a talk on the Names of God, the beginning of a series on this topic. This first talk was to be a gentle introduction so I thought it wouldn't take too many hours of preparation. Well, I quickly discovered that the research is almost bottomless; every time I thought I had a somewhat definitive list of names, I found another source which added a few more or gave a different twist on some of the names I had already come across. After several hours I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data (and that was only looking at the Hebrew Bible). I wondered how I could present this to people in an orderly and accessible fashion and within a reasonable time frame. Not everyone is up for a 3-hour lecture crammed full of detail on a Sunday morning. So I took a break and spent a bit of time meditating on this problem and asking the Spirit for guidance. And then I thought that being overwhelmed by Go

it's a mad mad mad world (of theology)

The mad dash for the end of term has begun.  I have finished all my required readings and have jumped into research reading.  One of my papers is on the madness of theology (the correlation seems more obvious to some of us than to others).  Truly inspiring stuff, I am finding.  Let me share a few quotes here: There is a certain madness in Christianity – in a desert God who is jealous and passionate, in a saviour who speaks in apocalyptic terms, in a life of sacrificial love, in the scandal of particularity.   In principle, a confessional theology should bear the mark of this madness, but the mark or wound must constantly be renewed. - Walter Lowe, "Postmodern Theology" in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology , 2007.   “In the Scriptures the odd phenomena constituting the ‘Kingdom of God’ are the offspring of the shock that is delivered by the name of God to what is there called the ‘world,’ resulting in what I call a ‘sacred anarchy.’   Consider but a sampling o

comedic timing

Comic by Joel Micah Harris at xkcd.com One of my favourite jokes goes like this: Knock, knock. Who's there? Interrupting cow Interrupting cow w--- Moooooooo!! Timing is important in both drama and comedy. A well-paced story draws the audience in and helps it invest in the characters, while a tale too hastily told or too long drawn out will fail to engage anyone. Surprise - something which interrupts the expected - is a creative use of timing and integral to any good story. If someone is reading a novel and everything unfolds in a predictable manner, they will probably wonder why they bothered reading the book. And so it is in life. Having life be predictable all of the time is not as calming as it sounds. We love surprises, especially good surprises like birthday parties, gifts, marriage proposals, and finding something that we thought was lost. Surprises are an important part of humour. A good joke is funny because it goes to a place you didn't expect it to go. Sim