The Challenge to be a Beauty Chaser

There is pain in this world, great pain, deep pain, seemingly insufferable and often excruciating... but it is redeemable.

I write this blog with the insight and teachings of Greg Fleming from the Maxim Institute who I've heard over the past two days at a conference in Brisbane. While on an intellectual level, I really appreciated all of his 4 sessions, the third hit me personally. If you've been reading this blog for a while, or know me outside of the on-line world, I don't think you'd be surprised to learn it was based upon the challenge of Pain and Suffering in our world.

I walked out of this third session burning with the belief that I want to be a beauty chaser. In a world of pain and suffering there is God's redemptive power calling to teach of us, whispering that there's something better than the twisted pain we experience resulting from this fallen world. There is beauty, there is goodness, and regardless of what we may sometimes feel - God IS Good.

I was challenged on my theology. Am I a consumeristic Christian? Defined by a newspaper columnist after the Elim School Tradgedy in NZ:

"Belief in God is not some sort of commercial transaction - I'll say my prayers every night, you protect me from any pain and grief - it doesn't work like that."

And with this theology crumble when things go wrong, doubting the very existence or inherent qualities of God? Or, do I believe and act as though, that regardless of my circumstance God is still just as good and powerful and loving. A belief that God isn't all about me (a tricky thing as Adrian Plass explains in his book Growing Up Pains where "Everyone is I") and what he can do for me, but that simply he is God, and my faith is in him.

Greg shared 6 principles of this theology entitled The Tension in the Reality:

1. God is good, the world is good, there is truth and beauty
2. There is also great pain and suffering
3. The fall brings this tension - it distorts that which is good
4. Ultimately sin curves in on itself - Incurvatus in se (Latin)
5. Whilst the direction of creation is twisted, it's structure is not
   
6. Because sin and evil are the twisting of good - not the opposite of it, we don 't disengage from the culture of creation but seek to redeem it.

A number of people have expressed to me on different occasions that God has gifted me with the ability to see life a little differently from most. Pain is deep. I want honesty (even where it hurts). I hate the "happy happy joy joy" of ignoring what's actually going on and brushing over issues. This view can bring cynicism, but it can also see beauty in difficult situations. It hears the rain falling on my roof right now and pictures the parched soil soaking it up, my Dad's gerbra's lifting their faces towards the downpour exalting in the drench...

I'd like to work a lot more on this topic of seeing the beauty, to choose and catalog the beauty amidst the pain, but I'm off to work for the moment and above are just some random thoughts not yet fully explored... but yes, I feel urged, amidst the pain that I often feel, amidst the anxiety and down times to relish life, to cherish beauty and to fight against the post-modern view that both are meaningless.