Is a Diamond a Diamond?

Is a diamond a diamond that is not found? If not, then what is it before it is pulled from the ground? What good is a diamond that never meets eyes? In the dark heart of the earth it waits to exist. 

It waits for the light to reveal what it's worth. 

Its beauty does not change, but no eye sees it waiting, hidden in its dark and quiet place. How many eyes will see it even if it is pulled free to meet the light? Is a diamond a diamond when no one sees? 

The answer, I'm afraid, is in you and in me.

To the Next President

In the United States, the office of the President is far bigger than whoever holds it for any four or eight years. It was purposely designed to restrain those would attempt to be king. While those who run for President are driven by many different ideas and passions, I believe the office gives all who hold it a higher calling than whatever got them there. 

To feel the weight of an entire nation as vast and diverse demographically and ideologically as it is geographically cannot but sober even the most arrogant of souls. Those who enter such an office will find there a heavier burden than they could have imagined. 

To the next President of the United States, may you bear the burden earnestly and humbly. May it sober but not overwhelm you. May it draw up in you the best of all you have to offer to all those who now must look to you for protection and leadership. 

May you become in spirit what you have won in name as President of the people of the United States, in all their beauty, brokenness, hope, and fear.

What Matters Most

They tell me I'm a writer, so I write. I write whatever I can, I write whatever I must. I put pen to paper and let it bleed until the pain stops, let it bleed to the very last drop. When I write that way I never know what will find its way to the page. Who knows what will escape the cage? Blood rage, red on the brain, blue on the page, flows out when it flows over.

Throw open the windows and let the wind blow. I'm wrong in the dark, so wrong when it’s dark, but I'm learning what it means to be right in the shadows, right in the dark, right when all eyes are elsewhere. I'm learning what it means to be right when it matters most to the one who most matters. 

We matter in the dark. We matter in the night when the lights are off and the stage is empty. We were made to matter, but not in the ways we so often assume. We were made to matter before most of what matters to us was made. We see the skin when what matters is what it’s holding in.

Fear

Beauty

What reason is there for beauty? What purpose does it serve?

Beauty fosters longing for something beyond our understanding. Beauty makes us believe in something more, something bigger than what we can see, smell, touch, taste, and hear. Beauty is a promise, a hand motioning us onward, a voice calling to us from a better place where beauty lives unmolested by all the sins that scar us here. Beauty tells me about God, and about my sins, the ways I try to steal from others and from God.

Beauty is as simple as a pen that feels right in my hand and as complex as the universe. When I leave this world, I want to leave it with some record of my encounters with beauty. When we are stopped by something beautiful, we are noticing God's hands at work. That sweet, searing agony beauty inflicts upon our hearts is the whole story of God and man written on our very souls, the ecstasy of Eden, the sorrow of sin, and the joy of restoration all bound together.

Beauty is evidence of love.