Grace Notes

Let my life be a melody to my king
Full of the harmony of love and peace
Graced with notes of joy

Sometimes, as today, I wonder how I can spend so much of my life effectively blind to what God has done. He is not simply the creator of the universe, masters of stars and nebulae and black holes that spin the galaxies into shape. He braids he laws of physics around his fingers, and without him, nothing would hold together. Surely that is splendid, but it does not touch my heart.

Mystic Mountain - NASA

The earth itself is beautiful with a splendor that sometimes takes my breath away, when clouds edged silver by sunlight wrap the verdant green of the mountains against the bluest of skies, when the wildflowers sway in the field like summer's confetti, or the ocean rolls, full of light and dark and salt. It is beautiful and this does, in its way, touch my heart, but nature cannot save me, cannot fill me.

Photo by Michael Gabler

Then there are people, wonderful, beautiful people, who touch my life for good or ill, who take my heart and fill my hours. But they are flawed, as selfish as I am, as incapable of understanding and as deaf of heart at times. And though I love them, they cannot save me.

The Arena in Arles - Van Gogh

But, my God, not only has he saved me, but he has given me back my ability to enjoy everything else he has done. Because I am saved, I can love those who hurt me. Because I am filled with his joy and his strength and his peace, I cannot look at the sky and be struck breathless with awe at the beauty of what my God has created. Because I am loved, I can examine the laws that hold this universe together and see the glory of my Father. Everything I see, I see because he has put it there.

But I forget. Sometimes, I see the stars and do not remember what holds them in their places, I look on the mountains as only a feature of the land, and I see people as untrustworthy and not worth my time. This should not be possible, and yet, I have proved every day that it is so. So I pray today that my eyes will be opened and never closed to what my God has done, to his tremendous love and his faithfulness more constant that the sun. I pray that I will sing out the love of my God with every action, that, though there be grace notes, there will be no rests in my song.