Glory - A Ramble

Spring starts in January here. I love that the warm weather doesn't wait, that we get to breathe spring while the light still carries its gorgeous winter roses around.

It's our third day sunny since our last bout with clouds. My eyes chase the light still, trying to save it, satiate myself with it.

Sometimes I think that I will miss the sun when God creates a new heaven and a new earth and lights it all up with His glory. I have never seen His glory, so I scrabble through dust after familiar beauty, beauty subjected to frustration because of me, because of Him, because of hope.

I think it will be like a smile, like waking up to my baby's happy, when his eyes light up as he sees me and he grins big. Or like saying "yes" to my Piper when she wants something special from me and her eyes dance with excitement and I miss her regular color because there are so many other colors sparking around in her deep eyes. Or like looking deep into soft, bright brown love that spills over innocent and deep and full from my husband's heart.

How can I describe light, describe glory? Words are not enough, not in any language. Perhaps aching on my knees, raising up my hands, closing my eyes, turning my head toward it to feel it, embrace it, welcome it, welcome Him...

I wonder what Jesus remembered of His glory when He came. I consider today His suffering, the dust He walked in, the dust He became, the dust He loved in loving us. He traded glory for sunlight and moonlight, for sorrow, for fellowship in our lives here.

How homesick He must have been, acquainting Himself so intimately with our grief.

Becoming like Him means becoming less, but not in the way we think it, not in the way we try to shut us down and ward us off in pursuit of His perfection. Becoming less - it means imitating Him, turning away from our own familiar light, choosing dust, choosing human, letting God be God - embracing the weight of His glory in our weakness, in our foolishness.

I think I can see it in my heart sometimes when I am broken, every knee bowing before Jesus, the Son of Man who is the Son of eternal God - who set aside His glory, who made Himself nothing, who humbled Himself before us - US! - and died. Eternal God chose death and died like us, died for us, bearing all the weight of all our griefs and sins and sorrows.

Even He knelt before God and asked not to bear it, but "Your will, Father, not Mine..."

I learn to yield. I learn that obedience results not from subjection or domination but comes by way of submission, by way of humbling, by way of opening my empty up to Him, offering my vessel-dust to be filled with glory.

Sometimes I think I'll miss the sunlight. But I have a feeling I won't notice its absence for looking at Jesus.

Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to death—
even death on a cross!

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

- Phil. 2:5-11

(Image © Informal Moments Photography)