“How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.”
C.S. Lewis
I once had a teacher who explained life this way: the world is like a tapestry, or an embroidery. And we, finite as we are, can only see the underside. Have you ever seen the back of a piece of embroidery? It’s a mess of threads, knots, tangles, and lines without form. The colors start and stop for no reason. There is no pattern, no rhyme, no discernible shape.
It can be tempting to look at the back of a piece of embroidery and say, “This is ugly.”
But we are only half-wise, because the One who holds the needle is the One who sees the art.
Throughout history, evil has shown itself to be colorless, empty, and predictable. There are no new evils under the sun; each is just a copy of the ones that came before. Evil cannot create, it can only warp and remove and flatten.
But the God of the good, the wild, and the strange weaves wonders with a vast array of unnameable colors, each one unique. Miracles are untamed, and the way His needle moves is never predictable. God loves variety; it’s there in His wonder-filled world. He planted it for us to find.
If you have been taught that God is predictable or easily defined, you have been deceived.
Our secret evils—some say our sins—are nothing new. They are all the same, and all equally as empty and ugly. But the God of the good, the wild, and the strange longs to take them and replace them with our true selves, as He made us: bursting with color and pattern, like fingerprints. No two alike. Each thread of life is necessary for His needlepoint—His art—in ways that we could not possibly imagine or see, from here below.
He longs for us to know Him as He really is: the God of the unpredictable. And we, His strange saints.
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Lovely and true. We add our few stitches to the glorious tapestry that God is weaving through us.