Beautiful Things

If you're looking for a kids Bible, I can't recommend what my kids have enough.  Maeve is an early reader and LOVES the Early Readers Bible.  She has read the entire Old Testament and kept asking me when she would get to Jesus.  I told her she could skip ahead if she wanted to and she refused saying she had to go in order.  Well, finally last night she turned the page and it was the story "Jesus Came to Love Us" about the birth.  Her eyes lit up as if she had just won a prize in one of those waiting room claw games.  Her patience paid off.  

The hilarity of my kids right now is that they are pretty much running their own church, unknowingly.  They are competing over who is farther and what stories they know.  Maeve's stories have questions at the end and so they are holding little Bible studies every day.  Paul and I just keep looking at each other and smiling.  

Last night Noah was reading and asked to read in bed with me instead.  He crawled up in bed and said "I don't want to read the Bible anymore."  I asked why and he said "Because the next thing is the crucifixion and I don't want Jesus to die."  I reminded him that without death there is no resurrection and sometimes we have to go through hard things to fully understand beauty.  

He opened again this morning to Jesus turning the tables and we talked about righteous anger.... about how Jesus turns everything upside down and sometimes we need it in order to really see what is going on.  

As I was sitting here this morning looking at shower pans for the new house online, I had Pandora tuned to The Rend Collective and this song came on in the background:

I wasn't really paying attention to it until I heard over and over again that the dust is made into something beautiful and then I really connected with the words.  I know that God is and can and will make something so beautiful out of all of this dust and that no expects beauty to grow in a dead place but it is and it does.

There are certainly moments of despair and hopelessness as I read some of the terrible statistics that are out there and I watch as my whole life is reoriented and turned upside down, but I also see so much beauty forming and being planted.  And for all of it I am so grateful.

Beautiful Things

by Gungor

All this pain
I wonder if I’ll ever find my way
I wonder if my life could really change at all
All this earth
Could all that is lost ever be found
Could a garden come up from this ground at all

You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of the dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us

All around
Hope is springing up from this old ground
Out of chaos life is being found in You

You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of the dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us

You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of the dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us

You make me new, You are making me new
You make me new, You are making me new