Jay’s Blog – Beauty and Pain
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Last week, I shared with you that my daughter was married the week before last; it was our first family marriage in this generation. Our hearts were filled with the beauty of that ceremony: from people who bothered to come such a distance to celebrate her marriage and to love us, to watching my children love and serve each other so well, and, most of all, to seeing the hand of a God who loves, cares, and provides for us so well.
But if I’m honest, my heart was not only filled with beauty. A week before the wedding, my daughter took her car to the mechanic. As is normally the case, her mechanic gave her a laundry list of items that, in his opinion, needed repair and/or replacement. And as she normally does and has done ever since she could drive, she sent the list to me to determine which items actually needed to be repaired or replaced and which could wait.
As I reviewed the list, it hit me: this was the last time I would ever be reviewing such a list for this one. If she had sent it to me two weeks later, I would have said, “You need to let Sam (her now-husband) review that list, honey. That’s his list.” It struck me that after 28 years of being her protector, provider, and shepherd in the Lord, I would no longer fill those roles. Someone else had taken my place. And although that is so good—a blessing I’ve asked the Lord for her whole life, a blessing that brings me great joy—it also brings me pain. My relationship with her has changed forever.
At her wedding, as people came to celebrate with us, they also shared with me that they were, to one degree or another, suffering pain. Several of my friends had lost loved ones that week or were grieving that someone we both loved was not there to celebrate the wedding with us. After the wedding rehearsal, my stepmother pulled me aside. She shared with me that, shortly after my father’s passing in November (I was in Colorado and unable to be at his side), she went through his pockets. He had only one thing in them: a small photo of my daughter, taken when she was three years old and now preparing to celebrate her wedding day. My stepmother handed me the photo and encouraged me to carry it with me as I walked her down the aisle, to remember my father’s presence with me. The beauty of a wedding celebration, paired with the pain of great loss.
For all of our wedding guests, and for each of you living day-to-day in this Genesis 3 world, beauty and pain co-exist. We carry one in one hand, one in the other. And, for now, that’s exactly as it should be. Our natural selves rail against this notion. We try to shuck pain away as quickly as we can, as if beauty alone were only possible in this world. As if it were even desirable.
We can’t have beauty without pain, because pain brings beauty into contrast. We see and appreciate the goodness of God in our lives because we know, in the depths of our souls, that we deserve only death and hell. And so, when we receive something that’s not that, when we see glimpses of the divine, of God’s providence all around us, we recognize that we are receiving grace upon grace. Likewise, the only way we truly experience peace is as a respite from disruption or discord. We could never appreciate any of these things fully if we thought we deserved them or if we got them all the time. It’s only through the lens of suffering and pain that we can truly be thankful for grace.
Likewise, no matter how inclined we are sometimes to believe otherwise, there is no pain without beauty. As we suffer the pain and turmoil around us, and if we’ll surrender these sometimes dark days to the Lord’s work, God brings forth beauty. Our lives are transformed into something other than we were, something more beautiful. We are glorified, meaning we reflect the nature and character of God, in a way that would never be possible if all we received was beauty. Anyone who has walked through and emerged from darkness would say that, while the darkness wasn’t their friend, the fruit borne from it most assuredly was. And we find ourselves grateful for that pain, as well.
I was reading a book on aging gracefully by Jen Wilkins the other day called “Dust to Dust.” (My kids are making fun of me because I’m reading more books like this these days!). She observed that much of the Bible contains literary devices known as chiasms. A chiasm is a literary device where a sequence of words or concepts is repeated forwards and backwards for dramatic effect, as mirror images of each other. Jesus used chiasms often, such as “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” On a larger scale, the Creation story of Genesis is a chiasm, with the Lord creating part of the world, such as the land and the sea, in the first three days, and then filling the world, land, and sea in the last three. Kind of a literary valley, where one side looks almost identical to the other.
Wilkins noted that life itself is a chiasm. It begins with people gathered, labor and pain, the inhalation of the breath of life, and great beauty. At this point, life is measured in potential. Likewise, life ends with people gathered, labor and pain, the exhalation of the breath of life, and, for those who are in Jesus, great beauty. At this point, the potential of one’s life, whatever it is, is finally realized. Throughout our lives—the beginning, the end, and every point in between—we hold beauty and pain in balance.
I think in life we’re too quick to abandon one in place of the other. We’re too quick to chase after beauty, to seek comfort, good times, and peace, at the cost of the refinement of our souls that comes through the crucible of pain. On the other hand, we often think we have to completely work through the pain of life, our turmoil, trials, and suffering, before we can ever experience beauty and joy again. But that day is probably never coming, at least on this side of life’s veil.
The magnificence of the gospel, of Christ’s finished work on the cross, is that we can hold beauty in one hand and pain in the other, simultaneously and together, and let the intensity of one drive us to the other, each filling us with gratitude and doing its transformative work within us. We can always say, “It is well with my soul.”
There will come a day when we can drop pain forever, when the fullness of who we are and who we will one day be will be revealed, and we’ll have no more need of pain. Only beauty will remain. Until that day, both are constant companions and, in some senses, reliable friends. Both anchor us to Jesus.
Jay Ferguson, Ph.D., Head of School at Grace Community School, writes regularly on his blog, JaysBlog.org.