What’s going on here?

Someone said to write what you’d like to happen upon. For me, that means finding really true things and the comfort and consolation in them.

A lot of times truth and comfort mean unearthing gruesome things, burdensome things, and holding them gently without flinching or backing away. It turns out grace and truth aren’t afraid of these. Grace and truth came for these. It turns out the desperate, the despised, the dark, the desolate: they live in me, they live in you, they live in our world, but they are not too much for grace and truth.

This world is God’s. We receive a Divine welcome in Christ. It holds no judgment or shame; those are ours. We mix them with our problems, and they muddy the waters of our entire lives. We will not escape without help. We need renewal. We need remaking. And recreation isn’t a thing to perform. It’s an act of God. It’s something that happens to you, something to submit to and wonder at and not filter through others’ eyes and thoughts and words.

God redeems the world; God redeems you. That is always and only the realest and most dramatic story: the controversy, the angst, the striving of the rest of our lives perpetually subordinate to the real and glorious work of God to remake.

Here’s the crux of what I think is true:

Good and beautiful things exist and dark and terrible things exist, and the terrible will not win out over the beautiful.

The fallout: we don’t hide from the Good; we don’t hide from the dark and terrible. The truest and best in this world uncovers the worst to let the light in. Uncovering holds no horror. For us, only mending remains: to sort through, to weep, to wonder, to hurt, to try, to fail, to follow, to speak, to listen, and to live. Coram Deo is our reality, and it is a miracle, a wonder, a glory, a mystery, and an eternal, expansive radiance. No, the darkness holds no horror.