Truth and Beauty

Music, tone of violin
Piano, jazz, can set a mood
Wagner, Bach, and theremin
Are considered very good.

But so is caring for the poor
And trying to be empathetic
Could it be that what is moral
Also is what is aesthetic?

Without conviction our actions are hollow
Art without moral is hard to swallow
For that which makes a thing beautiful
Is also that which makes us whole.

Good is not better
And bad is not worse
By God we must measure
Soul, string, and verse

Good, better; worse worst
Bad, worse; better best
One thing last, one thing first
Some are better than all the rest

In order to compare two things
You need to know that better is
You need to know about your sins
Nothing can be relative.

Faith and virtue, viola and flute
Truth and beauty are both absolute
Both we call good, both we applaud
Because both were created by the very same God.

Picture of Grace

Her hands whisper beauty as her feet take their place

The love of movement holds still on her face

All fear that was there is gone with no trace

She is a picture of grace

The music takes form in her fingers and toes

Like a leaf on a river, it ebbs and it flows

Her form likes to follow wherever it goes

Capturing truth in each pose.

Logic meets love in the glow of the lights

Neither one nor the other feeling contrite

Beauty and truth, for a moment, don't fight

For a moment all things seem right

Her pointe is a pen on the audience's soul
Each punctuation soon takes its toll
Cursively writing emotions in scroll
Noting what it means to be whole

The music ends as tears fill their eyes

Even the very most stoic ones cried

They know with the dancer's bow and goodbye

They are left more alive

To Feel Again

I haven't been able to feel much this past week. My heart was stuffy as if it had a cold. Most people think depression is where you are really sad, or a perpetual debbie-downer.  Depression doesn't work that way.  There are two main kinds of depression. On one hand, you have people who feel more than normal people do.  I have a couple of friends like that. "Happy" for them is euphoria for a "normal" person, and sad is dysphoria. They can't contain, nor control their emotions.  They are caught in a whirlwind and feel like they can't get out of it.  People with this type of depression have an incredible blessing beyond the obvious curses; they have felt emotions that I can't begin to comprehend.  They have tasted heaven, along with the hell.

The other kind of depression is, I feel, the more sinister.  People with this depression feel less.  Do you know how hard it is not to feel?  To want to cry, but can't?  To see a sunset that you know is overwhelmingly beautiful, but remain underwhelmed? To eagerly anticipate free time for a hobby, but find yourself unable to focus...again. To walk next to someone special, to share in a precious moment, yet feel distant. Detached. Dead.  What does a man do if he can't feel?  How can a man cry out to God...if he can't cry at all.

Today I felt again; I laughed the hardest I have in a long time; I cried harder than I have in a long time. God heard my muddled, muffled heart.  He gave me strength of heart to live and love. He kindled joy in my heart that gives me hope. It's a reminder to me that God is in all things sovereign.  He can bring a man down to the depths; He can raise him up to the heavens.  He can give a man depth of heart, and he can take it away.  He is the same God to both, and to both, He is good.  He is the measure by which real and normal take meaning.  I don't know why I go through phases of lifelessness, but I know that in it, God is good, and that somehow my lifelessness will bring life more abundant to either me, or some other of His children.  As much as it cuts me to the core, I delight in the opportunity to be forced to rely on God's strength completely, in heart and mind, when my own falters.  God is good.

Beautiful...

This has been a beautiful weekend. Its been a tough weekend, but a beautiful one. God has given strength and relief exactly where and when it was needed. This next week will be full of really big decisions, but I know that God is with me and I'm not afraid. :-)

Thanks

I thank God for pain.  I know that seems really odd, or maybe downright crazy.  I thank Him for it none the less.    We have the capacity to create worlds.  Worlds so deceptively perfect that we forget what's real.  Pain wakes us up.  It calls us back to God.  It faces us - kicks us in face - with the question of how a good God could be sovereign over a world so evil.  In the face of pain, one cannot ignore God.

I thank God for a rainy day.  You think I jest or lie to myself, but I do...thank him, that is.  Gloomy, Eeyore days are days "that the Lord has made" no different than the sunny ones.  Rain, thunder, clouds, and snow all work to make the flowers grow.  Hardship is the wildfire that prepares our hearts for growth.

I thank God for silence.  I find myself trying to fill it whenever I meet it.  I try to silence silence.  You know, God speaks in silence.  I spend my time crying to God for wisdom and clarity, and I don't even listen to his whispers. After witnessing the strength and faithfulness of God in dispelling the prophets of baal with fire from heaven, Elijah ran to the mountains in fear of his life from Queen Jezebel. He was hiding in a cave.  God told Elijah that he would pass by the cave and talk to him.  There was an earthquake, a fire, and a tornado, but the presence and word of God was not in those.  After all these things, there "came a gentle whisper."  God spoke to Elijah in the silence.  After deafening, devastating noise,  the voice of the Lord came in a whisper.  Listen to it, will you?

I thank God for everything.  I thank Him for good, bad, A, and D.  I thank Him for euphoria and dysphoria alike. Height and depth are His.  The vast expanse of human emotion is in his hands, and it is Good.

 I thank God that He is faithful.  He is faithful no matter what.  Believe it or not, God is greater than my ability to screw things up.  There is nowhere I can go, nothing I can do that is beyond the reach of His grace.  He promises never to leave or forsake me.  He keeps His promises. 


Now thank we all our God!
Rock, star, and atom
Sing praises when we do not.
His faithfulness no one can fathom.


Earth, fire, and wind obey
My prayer is that we too may
So thank our God above
For His unfailing Love.

Once upon a cold spring shower

Once upon a cold spring shower
I ran across a beautiful flower

I couldn't believe what I had done
Crushed to death it would never grow
But I remembered without the sun,
And as it began to snow,
The flower was doomed before I killed it
Almost as if God had willed it.

I am as the spring time flower
Here today, but gone tomorrow.

So why can't I be beautiful,
Gracing the souls of passers by?
My failure causes others pain
If someone cared, I'd know not why.

Speak and act with only love
Build up others in their need
Or you might find before the frost
That you are just a weed.

So in the spring, when you grow
Be beautiful before it snows.

Spring

Diamonds, crystals, shining glass
Crash to the floor with a gentle splash
Dim the sun to hardly a glow
Make the flowers grow

Vision had escaped my power
Trapped amidst this deafening shower
Hoping, dreaming, wishing to know
If it ends with a rainbow

What burned in fall and frozen after
Is now engaged in joyful laughter

Is it wrong to think you're beautiful?
Is it wrong to feel your pull?
Is it wrong to want to be your friend?
Is it wrong to love your soul?

Logic leave us

I've been thinking a lot about what i want to do with the rest of my life. More precisely, I've been trying to sort out what to major in in college. The top majors on my list are all technical ones. God has given me a brilliant mind. He has also given me the heart to see beauty and love. Sometimes, though, I feel like Spock. Love and Logic clash. Input not found. Love is not logical, but love is real. It is not a reasoned dissertation that moves the soul, but love. What amazes me is that I can see the beauty in logic. This is my gift. The most intricate theories of mathematics are beautiful. Math is beautiful. But now read this poem (which is still a work in progress). Don't read it in silence. Read it aloud. Hear it. Feel it. Taste both it's structure and beauty.

Logic leave us, let us love.
Facts and figures fail to feel
After all falls from above
Love is left, alone is real.

But beauty flows from out the mind
Intangible touches to the soul
Makes a man a man of kind
Holds the heart, makes it whole

A friendship based in beauty and fact
Love meets Logic hand in hand
Never did such strange attract
Free to fly, never to land.

Fire

Just like pride, summer comes
Right before the fall
Then it ends, goodbye to friends
Work and school then call

But every season in its time
Comes as God wills it along
Another verse, a harmony
In heaven's symphonic song

That's when nature comes alive
Beautiful visions never tire
Colors man can't comprehend
The trees all
Are on fire

beautiful

hopes when all hope is lost
sings when the music has stopped
dances when all others drop
is beautiful

At the barricade

At the barricade we left our lives
For months on end we gave our all
We parted ways and said goodbyes
After the curtain started to fall.

We told a great story which we dearly love
And made the audience feel sublime
Songs of redemption that deeply move
Poems of mercy and love divine

The final page has finally closed
Today is tomorrow; tomorrow’s here
The moments of which mem’ry’s composed
Misery, elation, and the audience cheer

Halfway to Heaven

Halfway to heaven
Upon wings of riveted steel
I took flight and saw beautiful lights
So beautiful that even
Compared to them, real wasn't real.
Stars in the heavens, and cities at night.

Oh, lights on the ground
How you glimmer, sparkle, and shine!
Your beautiful chaos
Is forged bright in circles and lines.

What man has worked
His whole life to create
God has used
To show He is great.

His creativity mirrored,
You shine in the night
And in the darkness
You spread forth His light.

silent memories

I sit here alone with no one to talk to.
Silence of heartbeats and whispers of soul.
Companions are daydreams that certainly aren't you.
But can memories really console?

Memories make the silence less silent.
Like Dante's Beatrice, they are just a sign
Until the time I next see you again
Pointing to beauty and love divine.

The Music of the Spheres

“All nature sings
And around me rings
The music of the Spheres.”

“Space”, the dark frontier, the infinite void, unexplored, inexplorable. Man’s concept of the universe is not an infinitely large one, it is most certainly much closer to nonexistent. It is only a recent “advance” in thinking that “space” is mostly nothing with a few lifeless balls of fire and debris. Only recently, are the planets only stone, and the stars just burning gas. Not long ago, Planets moved in Spheres with the Earth as the center, not as the most important, but as the lowest. Every other direction was up. Those Spheres would make music on a cosmic scale, singing to their Creator, as the planets in their orbits would dance to their music.

Modern science cannot detect anything but electromagnetic waves coming from the stars, so they claim they are lifeless blobs on a dark background. To be sure, they can’t detect anymore from you. No, The stars sing in the Heavens! They harmonize, wheeling round in perfect obedience to their master, shining His light in the night, in an ever unfolding dance so perfectly choreographed, by The Perfect King of it all.

No, my friend, the Heavens are not void, but full of testimony of God, the Infinite Creator of us all.