This diamond bow must have sparkled from the bodice of the elegant woman who funded it. Feminine, quiet, even simple in its drapes and folds, the craftsman who made it was able to give it textures of fabric even as metal was being formed to make the most of sparkle. This bow simply is. It rests in a kind of elegant simplicity and so too do you and I.
We are so worried about how to pray, how to worship, how to make good choices and how to be with others with whom we must be. And yet so infrequently do many of us ask how to be with ourselves or how to simply be with ourselves. Scriptures call us to be still and know that God is. That is the great art and courageous act of living a life. We will work very hard not to be. We will use many things to self-anesthetize against the work of simply sitting still and sparkling in God’s light when there is nobody to see the sparkle but the God from whom the light comes. And yet that is our great work.
God is in a constant work of creating all things over and over and over again. All creation is under divine construction. God seems to move about the laboratory of the cosmos with an elegance and curiosity which brings newness every moment and yet we do not often stop to see it unfolding in our hearts.
What is new in me? What has God tinkered with over night inside my soul? What new thing is God about in the rooms of the house I call my life? And what has God been doing in that one room in me which has so long been closed off, haunted, hosting ghosts which it is easier to pretend are not behind that closed door?
God is at work. God is making all things new inside us if we can but stop long enough to sit still and know that God is, and that we are, and that God’s is-ness and our is-ness are co-laboring to birth a new thing. Our work is not to make the sun rise. Our work is to see God’s glory when it does.
