Many of you don’t know these people.
Bob Johnson, Greta Weisser, Ed Lunn, Drew Thigpen, Brent Holladay, Jan Williams, Darrell Davies,Teresa Herlston, Renee French, Jimmy Manley-Miller, just to name some of the very recent losses close to Pam and me within a years time.
These were dear people in our lives. My closer than a brother brother-in-law, friends from church, life long childhood friend, our Minister of Music when we first arrived in Nashville, our children’s piano teacher, Pam‘s dear friend and hairdresser of decades, friends from the years as young adults, ones with whom we vacationed in those years we never considered the possibility of dying. And then there was the son of my former bible study buddy, music compadre, his loving wife and their daughter.
Along with these we’ve lost, our city has been struck hard by tornadoes, and almost simultaneously, we now face this COVID-19. pandemic.
There are so many biblical verses that bring us hope, inspiration and the means to cope through catastrophe and painful seasons and events. Even in the darkness of all of our losses and all that we face, there is a beauty and strength that emanates from those scriptures.
Things we didn’t see before suddenly come clear to us. The unlovely become lovely, precious even. The forgotten are remembered in the life of tragedy.
People through death, and difficulty become more meaningfully beautiful in a way we cannot adequately translate.
It’s all so obscure but warmly apparent. The mystery of beauty is that it cannot be explained or defined. The more I try to give it definition, the more it exponentially loses its depth and meaning. It’s like sand through the fingers. There is no syllabus or manual to explain the beauty of how God does His work in us, teaches and transforms us. He is the author of the unexplainable. So beauty is it’s own enigma.
Shakespeare writes about it so eloquently, this word, beauty.
“But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,”
This is beauty only God creates.
The Human Wave 