Beauty of Holiness

My eyes glassily reflect the auburn sky in its fire.

My innermost being exhales the crisp beauty that claustrophobically engulfs me.

Beaming rays of life sparkle heavily, exhilarating God's presence.

My tongue tastes the dark and sweet serenity enveloping my soul.

In my senses feel the beautified life.

My ears prickle with the stillness, a blanket of sky in the forest.

I hear the mountain's thoughts lingering within me.

My breath is grasped away from my throat by the power of these things before my body.

My lungs are again busting with the serenity of the valley.

Shadows rest upon the swaying clover softly caressing my skin.

The wind reveals its mystery to me as it forms what is unspoken.

Its presence liquefies me and shakes me to awe before my God.

There are no secrets to be revealed;

Only what I am to be secret.

I am open and free with my Creator.

I bask in what He made.



I am face down in the beauty of holiness.

Creation

Soft, rolling hills gently scream existence into the very souls of the people as they blanket the essence of the innermost things that people long to desire. Mankind begs for the delicate majesty that is portrayed by creation's advertised life of the soul. People painstakingly strive to grasp the obvious things that they are blind to in front of their own eyes. This creation is declared by it's compassionate flowers that dot the existence of placid grass that blows by the warm winds that engulf the air and surround a person's soul with the heavenly abilities able to be touched. Yet these things can be so easily handled are manipulated into their own beauty. People forget that they were actually made to have intimacy with the reality that they were created to encounter who God is. Who. God. Is. We were created to smell the very soul of the earth, the simple things of what it is made, and to feel the air about ourselves that is also as vital to us as what we believe. The vastness and simple complexities that make up the environment compatible of spiritual life itself when thought about in its full potential when largely considered, and when imagined puts every life in its perspective, but yet seems to give an air of inspiration that is not easily broken once realized. This inspiration makes the existence of breath feel alive and full of the things that our formed bodies could be. We were authored to bask in the surrounding and enveloping beauty that God's life proclaimed with His uppermost feeling and sanctuaries of His own heart. As our own hearts are opened from their lifeless state and their dead actuality, our souls can be opened to the things that draw us closer to God and the way we were made. If we all could walk in the steps we were created to, this world would have the existence life captured in the very breath of every heart and have given the vital expectancy that Christ intended it to have.

Simple Complexity

At times, words seem to flow endlessly and effortlessly to the exact expressions that they were created, while so much more consistently are my thoughts trapped in what I wanted to communicate to change in the world's existing mediocrity and strike the thoughts in minds of such a unmindful culture to what their existence is made to glorify. What is so familiar but uncertain and evokes so many deadening emotions inside the things of life that are wishing and waiting to be sharpened into expressions through my pencil, I cannot force them, the inner workings of a restless soul, to things they can not explain or attire with their authored meanings through speech and language. It is my impression that it amply seems that through the things most understood between a people's actuality whose bond is strengthened by love, it is not the common "communications" that convey the soul of a person. Words are mere fillers of existence, things carelessly used but can be unintentionally used to sharply ache and gash at the recesses of the heart. Life seems so droll to me that the expressionistic parts of itself are fogged by the simple lack of communication, yet how can we communicate with our insides locked up behind things that are so uneasily answered? Life, to me, is so simply complex.

Silver music, golden beauty

Are You still listening? So diligently longing to hear?
How You seem so close, seem so near?

Where has the time been gone 'till, the music fading until dusk
The music in the hardest of hearts. Waiting. Turning to dust.

A child's toy, Christmas bells. The joy that has so long gone.
Why can't we bow heads and lift our hands, embracing life's song?

The notes that float away, no one can find.
Catch them and put them deep in your heart and mind.

Music in it's beauty. Silver birds. Genuine loveliness
No regret or hesitation. Seeing things in their best.

I am tired. I am weary of the crispness of life.
I am sick. I am distinguished and numb from the bites.

Caught up in the words, the emotions and harmony.
The lips parting so willingly. The existence of being.

Tear stained cheeks. Why? Eyes lifted.
I find my answer in more than just music. In a life so willingly gifted.

Love in it's prime. No one can express or conquer.
The mystery of things. The understanding of thoughts sure.

My heart longs for syllables, for feelings. For care.
I am completely in awe and satisfaction. Too much to bear.

Much words over the unexplainable

I need to write. I need to type what my mind is so longingly wishing to put into words. There are emotions and struggles that my fingers cannot put to use of adjectives or cleverly designed sentences. As the wind swirls the crisp, bright golden and cherry red leaves around my feet, I feel inside that they are alive, they whisper something unsaid in human understandable tones. In groans and forcefulness that my mind understands, but my words do not. The air cuts through my fingers and captures my breath in its presence, claustrophobicly taking my existence and screaming into my thoughts of the communication of words of the hushed whispers of God that are so wistfully hungering to be heard by the eyes of men, but passed by. There is more to life than waiting to understand it in formed words of the mouth, of the substance of the physical world. Life is looking into the inexperienced, reaching out to the needs of the unspoken and unexpressed, distinguished and understood by the bulging brown eyes of a starving child wistfully communicating the murmurs that the spirit can fathom, but the mind cannot. Why is so much restricted in words? Can we just open our blind eyes and see that life is more than this? Life is Christ. The Spirit of Christ is alive, more alive than any pronouncement or consciousness that our intellect or heart could apprehend. Only the agility and vital air of the Spirit of God can fully distinguish and take knowledge of what the meaning of our souls can be.

True Worship

A few chilled nights ago, I sat on my bed, my legs crossed over one another, chord sheets strewn around the room, my notebook flung open, and my brow furrowed in concentration and worry. I had make a discovery. The notebook was filled with attempted worship songs I had secretly and affectionately written. I am always hesitant to show them to people; they sound more and more to me like words just tumbling clumsily over each other, the words not wanting people to see the meaning and emotions that they were created to exhibit. However, to my soul, the words are my prayers, desperate ones, ones crying out to Christ wondering why He feels so far away and words longing for comfort in His arms.

As I was looking more deeply into the meanings of my chicken scratch on the scraps of paper that seemed to be so personal to me and my love relationship with Christ, I was finding how self-centered I really am. Sure, it is essential to the deepening of our affection to Christ to spill our hearts open to Him, telling Him of all our wants and desires, of how we need Him to work in our lives and begging Him to reveal a drop His refreshing Spirit to our quenched souls. The thing all of my songs are missing is just a spirit of reverence, trembling in the pure awe and majesty of who God is. WHO GOD IS. All God longs for is our hearts, including the sweet aroma of praise that is so worthy of Him. How often do we just skip over the dumbfounding and complete elegance of the complexities of what Christ has done for us and go straight to our own needs. Even if we do address this to Him, how many times do we go straight to our desires, giving not the nearly the time of day that our God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob deserves. He is the God who has been there for me my whole life, never letting me down and giving me the longed desires of my heart.

A breath of Jesus

I have recently been feeling a time of shadow, a feeling of alone-ness and emptiness. A feeling of God not being there and so far away. I know these feelings are not true, just a time of testing. Look at Moses who wandered in the desert for 40 years! He probably had a feeling of alone-ness his whole life, with his people complaining and hating him for taking him out of their comfort zone to stretch them into God's incredible plan. But he was doing what was in God's will, what he knew was right, and kept doing it diligently no matter how hard life got or how far away He seemed. I bet now the rewards of doing that are totally worth it: sitting at Christ's feet, drinking in the power of His presence.

I have said before that music, especially acoustic guitar, is something that completely touches me like nothing I can explain. It overwhelms me with how powerful and altogether sensational (for lack of indescribable words) the way it hits me like no other illustrated thing. You won't know unless you have experienced it yourself. It's like genuinely talking to God, not like some rehearsed prayer you say in monotone while kneeling in the picturesque prayer position: symmetrically parallel to your bedside with folded hands and closed eyes. It sickens me to think that some people think that is what the Christian life is like.

Honest and actual worship and prayer for me is when I am alone in my room with no one around except God and my guitar, and usually submission and tears are involved. I sometimes whisper the beautiful love song in finger picking while meditating in hushed tones of reverence and amazement on the majesty of the complexities of who God is, groveling at His presence. At other times I completely scream out the words and try to show the extreme emotion of love and thankfulness I have towards the excellence of the unimaginable victory Jesus has over all my burdens and fears. My room and guitar have been my place of refuge, my "temple" of where God has met me in so many places and times of my life. It is a place where I have been through transformations and sleepless nights, of strong points and my weakest moments, of vulnerability and insecurity... God has been there with me patiently and firmly holding me in His strength through it all.

Today, I was practicing for tonight's worship at Awana. At times, the simplest words repeated in authenticity and a true natural spirit are the most effective. My window overlooks these maple trees in my backyard, which is one of the reasons I love my room so much. They are just barely starting to turn golden red, mixed with the beautiful and vibrant green of summer. As I was singing "Precious Lord reveal Your heart to me. You are holy, holy..." I just got stuck on the word holy, reproducing the wonder and awe of the flooding of God Himself into my dry and desperate spirit every time I softly whispered that powerful statement. "Holy". I watched the multicolored, beautiful creations in my backyard rustle gently in the faint breeze that made them seem to want to get out, to blare the love story of God to anyone who would just open their blind eyes and look around. "Holy" My thoughts and fingers cannot put these feelings into words beautiful enough to explain the emotion toward the fullness of my spirit in that half-hour. Holy is my God; altogether and completely holy and beautiful.