The most beautiful things I’ve seen lately might, at first glance, seem spoiled.

Maybe that’s because our buffed, airbrushed and artfully arranged culture leaves scant room for anything it deems less than “perfect.”

Just days ago I noticed that the peonies I paid too-much-a-stem for out-of-season are dying in the most exquisite way: leaving their silky, fragrant and feathery petals in pools of red on the dining room table. Each morning a few more fall, until now there are handfuls of them…so lovely that I can’t bear to pick them up and toss them away.

Recently I visited a 17 year old in the hospital; she is giving cancer a hard run for its money, and seems to be winning. Except her hair is gone, save the softest, fuzziest stuff that doesn’t keep her skull from showing through – and radiation has left mean scars on her neck where the skin was once soft and smooth.

Here’s what I noticed, as I watched her talk in a voice that never wavered: her eyes were luminous, brilliant blue – and her smile was quick and real. I couldn’t get over how pretty she looked, curled up in flannel pajama pants and a baseball t-shirt, chattering away as if we were at Starbucks, and neither of us was sick.

Then later, I stumbled over these words from Martin Luther, spoken in the parish church of Wittenberg on Christmas day, 1534: “Unto you,” states the angel, “is born a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” These words melt heaven and earth together, make death into sugar, and turn all ills, of which there are plenty, into delectable wine.”

Christ is the one who makes the difference. He is the Savior who transforms the broken and dying into the beautiful and blessed. Who makes death sweet and presses pain and sadness into the very best wine.

We want to look away from death and ruin and slow decay – but when we do, we miss their glory. It is when we see them as they are that their beauty blazes through – not until, and not before. And because He’s disarmed death, and left its wrappings behind like drifts of flower petals, hope lodges deep in every lovely ruin.

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing greatness of the power may be of God and not from ourselves; we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body. Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day…for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” (2 Cor. 4:7-10, 16, 18, NASB)

© Leigh McLeroy 2004