Beauty That Will Turn Your World Upside-Down

I've been pretty slack lately when it comes to writing down my thoughts. My apologies to anyone out there who may actually read my blog from time to time. Writing helps me to process my thoughts, and that's mainly why I keep this blog. I'm aware that God is constantly teaching me new things about the person he wants me to be, but I know if I don't record these truths somewhere, I'm likely to forget the new insights and stagnate in my journey as I follow after Jesus. In the past two months, there have been quite a few moments where I thought, "I need to write this down (on my blog)," but busyness kept me away, and now many of those nuggets of wisdom are buried in the recesses of my cluttered brain. Perhaps they will make their way to the surface once again...

Well, to end my blogging hiatus, here's a snippet from a book I recently finished after about 9 months of reading it. I know. Pathetic. (Seriously, the life of a stay-at-home, homeschooling mom leaves very little time for extra reading - except for late at night, when I fall asleep after reading a page and a half. Hence the 9 month completion rate!) Here are a few quotes from Tim Keller's The Reason For God. These excerpts come from a chapter he titled, "The Dance of God". When I read it, two truths stood out to me: 1. God is beautiful. The Holy Trinity of the Father, Son and Spirit - although mind-boggling - is absolute sheer beauty. 2. If we truly embrace this beauty, it will turn our lives and our world upside-down.

Read Keller's description for yourself:

The life of the Trinity is characterized not by self-centeredness but by mutually self-giving love. When we delight and serve someone else, we enter into a dynamic orbit around him or her, we center on the interests and desires of the other. That creates a dance, particularly if there are three persons, each of whom move around the other two... Each person of the Trinity, loves, adores, defers to, and rejoices in the others. That creates a dynamic, pulsating dance of joy and love.

If God is unipersonal, then until God created other beings there was no love, since love is something one person has for another. This means that a unipersonal God was power, sovereignty, and greatness from all eternity, but not love. Love then is not of the essence of God, nor is it at the heart of the universe. Power is primary.

However, if God is triune, then loving relationships in community are the "great fountain... at the center of reality." When people say, "God is love, " I think they mean that love is extremely important, or that God really wants us to love. But in the Christian conception, God really has love as his essence. If he was just one person, he couldn't have been loving for all eternity. If he was the impersonal all-soul of Eastern thought, he couldn't have been loving, for love is something persons do.

Sheer beauty. Now, here's another excerpt. This is what happens when we decide to embrace that beauty.

Ultimate reality is a community of persons who know and love one another. That is what the universe, God, history, and life is all about. If you favor money, power, and accomplishment over human relationships, you will dash yourself on the rocks of reality. When Jesus said you must lose yourself in service to find yourself (Mark 8:35), he was recounting what the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have been doing throughout eternity. You will then never get a sense of self by standing still, as it were, and making everything revolve around your needs and interests. Unless you are willing to experience the loss of options and the individual limitation that comes from being in committed relationships, you will remain out of touch with your own nature and the nature of things.

When "first" becomes "last", and "last" becomes "first, it seems upside-down, but as Keller aptly describes it, it really means we're seeing things right-side-up for the first time.