Hello Everyone
Jesus gets in our mess and turns our ashes into beauty. Isaiah 61:1-3. As children, one of our favourite toys was a kaleidoscope. Kaleidoscopes are made up of angled mirrors and coloured glass fragments, crushed beads, confetti, and shreds of ribbon, all housed in a cylindrical barrel. When the barrel turns, the fragmented pieces move and reflect unique, beautiful patterns in the rotating mirrors. When we think about life, although the world is a place of beauty, love, joy, laughter, and delight, it is also a place of mess. As the kaleidoscope of life turns and the fragmented pieces of disappointment, heartache, difficulty, pain, and suffering all rotate in the barrel of time, Jesus gets in our mess and turns our ashes into beauty and uses the things that can break us to change us to reflect His image.
The very fact that Jesus gets in our mess and turns our ashes into beauty is a miraculous gift. The biggest mess our humanity faces is the deep ditch of sin and separation from our maker. We forget that this is a ditch we could never have gotten out of apart from Jesus. We can get so used to hearing the story of Jesus and the incarnation that we lose sight of the monumental act of love on the part of Jesus to save us from our ravaged, sinful state. It is almost inconceivable that the Monarch of God’s kingdom, Jesus who is perfect, would join us in this mess to save and restore us. In exchanging His glory for human mess, He got down into the dirt and squalor of human wreckage as an act of sheer love. So, He knows the mess firsthand. As a by-product of His saving act, Jesus keeps getting in our mess every day and turns our ashes into beauty.
What a tender, beautiful, love-smitten Saviour we have. He takes every tangled mess of heartache and mends the frayed edges. He kneels with us in our private ‘Gethsemane gardens’ when we plead for Him to ‘remove this cup’ and intercedes when words fail us. He walks with us on our hidden pathways of failure and redirects us into His passage of grace. He gets into the fiery furnace of suffering with us and soaks us in His love and faithfulness. He takes the fragmented pieces of disappointment and rebuilds us into fine vessels. He gets into the deep well of loss and pours His healing balm upon our tattered hearts. Jesus gets in our mess and turns our ashes into beauty and as all the messy pieces in our lives continually move, He takes our mess, refines us and creates new patterns of beauty that reflect His character in us.
So, friends get your ‘beauty for ashes’ on today.
Best days to come.
Wen