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Try as we may, I do not think we are able to consistently handle balancing the beauty & suffering life brings us without God’s help. So, the question is, where does God who created us & all of life, fit into our lives in times of both beauty & periods of suffering?

The fact is, as we move through our days, God our Creator & great composer, is ever present with us in all living things & situations but sometimes we are so distracted by the scattered pieces of our lives that we just don’t recognize the varied ways that God may be speaking to us.

I believe that in times of suffering God may send someone to remind us of our ever-present God by reflecting His light in order to allow His light to transform us & strengthen us to help us heal.

Through His Grace, God longs for & empowers us to recognize, receive & then reflect His image outward to others, bringing into our lives the beauty of His image in which we were created.

Beauty is God’s will for His creation. God calls us to be ambassadors of His Grace as we encounter one another. That is our calling. Reflecting God’s Grace brings beauty, healing & peace to the universe.

As new life breaks forth in the Spring, God is revealed to us, sometimes in familiar ways & sometimes in fresh new ways.

As with the transformation of the caterpillar into a butterfly, humans also go through stages of being transformed by God

Life is complicated don’t you think? Sometimes we are able to see & experience the pure beauty of being alive & we feel holy joyful, grateful, hopeful, energized & purposeful. And then other times we experience & see unavoidable tragedy & we suffer & lose our sense of meaning, belonging & purpose in life. As our life experiences seem to shift between beauty & suffering, upon occasion, it can be a challenge to understand exactly what the ultimate meaning of this life we have been given is. That is especially true when we are experiencing suffering, be it caused by: serious illness, grief, loss, injustice, loneliness, betrayal, etc.

The Bible tells us that through God’s steadfast love for all creation  He has given us the freedom to choose how we will live amidst the beauty & the suffering we encounter through our living.  Though we have been given a choice of how we will live & receive the beauty & suffering of life, God walks with us through our life, guides us & awakens us in a wide variety of ways to feed our faith & to help us chose how we will experience & participate in the ultimate meaning of the life He gives us.  It is up to us what we chose to do as we move through our days.

The month of January is known as the month of new beginnings.  We have all just journeyed through the four weeks of Advent, which in the Christian faith is known as the season of preparation for the fulfillment of the new thing that God is about to do.  Following Advent, we stepped immediately into the observance & celebration of Christmas, the fulfillment of God’s promised gift of the birth of “Emmanuel”, God with us.  On Christmas Eve, we stepped into Christmas as if through our four weeks of Advent we had arrived to the point of being fully prepared to receive & live into God’s gracious gift of His Son, given for us.  And now in this first secular month of the year, we step into a New Year as if the former year is past & we were not affected by it & are prepared to live into a new year.