Beautiful Things

All this pain
I wonder if I’ll ever find my way
I wonder if my life could really change at all
All this earth
Could all that is lost ever be found
Could a garden come up from this ground at all

You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of the dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us

-Gungor

I've been thinking a lot lately, as I'm prone to do, as gets me into trouble often. Let me start with the most irrelevant, though not unimportant, thought, and hopefully progress to what I really want to talk about. When I came home tonight, my new roommate was watching, "What Dreams May Come," which I hadn't seen since it came out on video. But hours later, the phrase came back to me as I was thinking about posting a facebook status with that and the bit of quote before it about death and sleep (from Hamlet's famous "to be or not to be" monologue, if you don't remember).

All of the sudden I was flooded with the memory of a boy in my class in high school wearing those large pants that were so popular then, a wallet chain, untucked shirt, glasses, long shiny hair; skinniest kid I knew, but he wore so many clothes you could hardly tell. He kept company with more of the goth kids, but we were friends too, he was quite social and friendly, his name was Devon. He seemed an unlikely sort of kid to play this role, but whether it was chosen by him or for him, I can't remember, but he had to do this monologue. I swear I heard him do the thing 50 times, I learned most of it just from listening to him practice. I had no clue what the words really meant, and he didn't help much. But he was so dedicated to practicing it, the teacher kept saying, "Again....Again." But then one day, there was this moment, where that skinny kid in baggy pants alone on the huge, empty stage playing a role beyond his young years got it. He nailed it. For the first time I understood what the monologue was really trying to say, though I'd heard it every class for the past few weeks. And the 10 kids in our class were struck silent staring at Devon.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune(65)
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'tis a consummation(70)
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep—
To sleep—perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub!
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there's the respect(75)
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of disprized love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns(80)
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death(85)
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,(90)
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. Soft you now!(95)

"Whether 'tis nobler

The words of Hamlet's inner conversation came back to haunt me several years ago during the summer I stayed with Karen in New Jersey and I posted the entire monologue (in my Xanga...???!). It was the summer I got the call saying that Devon had been in a car crash, and he had not survived.

So many things I struggled with at the time, the ever present guilt in a young Christian's mind, "I didn't talk with him about Jesus as much as I should have!" The "What if it had been me?" and so many other common thoughts. But time has passed. I suppose it's been over 6 years now. I'm sure his family still remembers him every day, but I sure don't, and the regrets are less, and I think of him with fondness and dwell on the good.

We've been talking lately in Young Adult group about the soul and the body, and how in Jewish culture, they were not such separate things as we sometimes think of them, and also how the resurrection is a bodily resurrection. Jesus arose from the dead in bodily form, not just his soul, he had the wounds to prove it. But it is so hard for me to mesh that with the reality I know, of death and returning to dust. If the body is completely reabsorbed into the earth, then the resurrected body is a new body, and thus the first body WAS separate from the soul all along, but then a bodily resurrection would be unnecessary...so as you can see, I get carried away with the theologizing of the matter.

But here's the point, dear friends: The holy, set apart, unfathomable God of the universe gathered dust together and breathed life into it. We're all just one step away from Hamlet, facing an open grave, facing our own mortality of body, and yet still with our desperate longing for eternity within our souls. I don't say this to be morbid, or to depress you, but to point you away from all of the finality of that, point you in the other direction from the grave. We are the creatures that God has created for purposes we don't understand yet. We're all just a bit of dust, but we're God-breathed; the same is said of Scripture: God-breathed, inspired. So, my prayer for you is that you will be inspired by God, you are something beautiful though you were made from dust and one day will return to it. Our lives can change and grow, our spirits can be renewed, we can find peace in God and we really can trust that his word is true, even though it is so much easier to only trust it "in theory." You have an eternal hope living in you: this is God's promise. God makes beautiful things out of the dust, God makes beautiful things out of us.