Commentary
You should probably never ask me to TALK about this little poem… too emotional! The background photo is of my mother when she was a little girl. The photo was taken in the early 1930s. Mom was taken in 2006. It occasionally becomes obvious that I’m not through grieving.
The setting when I thought of the words really was waking up from an afternoon nap. As is often the case, I was wearing ear buds, and had been drowning out the noises in the house by listening to one of my favorite Pandora stations. As I awoke, I was keenly aware of how beautiful the music was… something from Pat Metheny.
I listened to another piece, and then another. Each was as beautiful as the last.
My mind went back through the years to the experience of taking naps as a child, to the awareness of family in other rooms, their voices becoming distant and indistinct as I fell asleep. I cannot actually remember anything before that. However…
Traveling back in time, I arrived at the conviction that my exquisite experience of beauty — here in music — has always been rooted in the love of my mother. She herself was beautiful. She loved me, and she loved beauty. But she also pointed me farther back, to the Author of beauty.
Farther Back
Time did not begin with my birth. When a Christian like myself refers to “love from the beginning,” he or she inevitably alludes to our belief that God has loved his children and had kind purposes for them “from the beginning.” When the Apostle Paul writes about this, he gets into one of the long run-on sentences (in the Greek) that signal his excitement:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.
Ephesians 1:3-10 (ESV)
I’m convinced that knowing the Creator, and being confident that He loves me, enables me to better appreciate the beauty of His creation.
