This piece of quartz crystal played host to gold as the minerals colluded to grow into this chunk of rock formation. Take off the gold, and you will find a gorgeous crystal of white and clear stone. Leave it on, and it shimmers with gold’s untarnished splendor.
We so often are so mired in self-scolding and the scolding of others that we often see only the mud on the rock. When we wash it away, we find the gold of God’s glory attached to us like some attractive lichen, but we do not realize how that gold is woven through the veins of our lives – wandering throughout the clear crystal of our being.
The mud is just a covering. Wash it off and underneath you will find the clarity of our lives exposing God’s invasion of us from before our creation. We are clear and open people in our most natural state with the veins of God’s glory woven throughout us like the blue of blue cheese or the air of a sponge or the sap of a maple in the fall’s cool nights. Trusting the inter-woven-ness of God in our lives is much of the work we must do. We are designed to be clear, light-filled people of tremendous color and sparkle. But too often we live within the mud of shames big and small; and then allow others to increase those shames into a perfect storm of addictions and self-anesthetizing.
In the stillness of the dark morning with one candle and a pot of tea, I can, in time, see the sparkle, as yesterday’s mud washes off under God’s tender work, to reveal a human made good and only splashed with evils along the pilgrimage. in the windows and mirrors of my room, things begin to sparkle. That sparkling is God’s dance with us.
