Beauty Coming for Me

I’ve spent all of my life, since my youth, looking for beauty. Searching for it as though for hidden treasure, hungering and panting after the source of all beauty – Beauty Himself, in fact. And every taste of Him has marked me forever. Every glimpse has left its indelible etchings upon my eternal soul. I was made for Him. I love One in whom my eyes have not yet seen, my whole life one great pursuit of the gain of knowing Him. 

But this I know, when all is said and done, and my days reach their finish line in this age, my testimony will always be: It was He who came looking for me. 

He was in the kindness of my father’s eyes as a child, and in the hunger and wonder of my comrades in my youth. He was in the sweetness of a young husband’s love, now decades full. He was in the sweet songs of the noble ones that filled the room day after day. He was in every flower and every sunset, calling and welcoming and even shouting my name. He was always coming for me in His beauty. 

And He came for me in my hour of greatest darkness. He came running through the night, calling my name. He came to find me where I hid, abandoned and alone. And stooping low, He sat right there beside me, weeping tears in the silence. He was God with me. Letting me pour out my soul in anguish, while He mingled my tears with His own, keeping them in His bottle - our bottle - knowing each of them by its precious name (Ps. .

In other dark nights, always had He come for me. Always had He found me, in every former season, and lifted me to Himself. But this was a night not like a passing shadow, but more like an ultimate deathblow, so it would seem. The severity was such, so as to crack open the very core of me, broken and shattered with turmoil and grief. Many times, I thought the sorrow would be the death of me. And even still comes the haunting shadow of that dark story. The fountain of tears can feel like the drowning of my soul. The shards of broken heart threaten to be a shattering irreparable.  

But such shadows forget the truer story. The true story of Beauty Himself still coming for me. The broken places that have at times seemed to me as an irredeemable splintering, are forging new pathways for the penetration of His beauty. Places that were hidden so deep, they were never known or accessible before, until a breaking of such severity made way. Like liquid gold filling in the chasms that had been sealed up before - now open to receive. Lifelong blockages have given way. And like that line in the song, “I had a dream that I was waking at the burning edge of dawn. And I could finally believe the king had loved me all along,” my every resistance to His love — resistances I’ve spent decades trying to hunt down - finally let loose their grasp. And the torrent of golden tenderness and grace is coming for me - for the most vulnerable and hidden parts of me, unrelentingly. 

If I gain His beauty, have I really lost anything? If His tender love has finally conquered the places He was always coming for, am I really shattered, or am I finally whole?