911 Anniversary

Her face still haunts me
this woman whose face I remember from television nearly ten years ago.
She stood near Ground Zero, New York
before we called it that.
She held a sign
hand lettered, primitive, on poster board
with his name and a picture of her husband's face.
He was lost in the rubble.
We could all witness her anguish
as we munched on popcorn
from the comfort of our living rooms.

We saw the searching eyes
the longing
the heartache
the terror that had begun to leave its footprints on her soul.
It was the beginning of a shattered world for her
and we sat as silent witnesses to the loss of her beloved.

When I see and remember her face now
the brokenness waiting to be born
I think she is a portrait of God -
longing for His lost children
longing for the restoration of relationship
longing for the broken places to be healed and restored
longing for reconciliation and love
and unwilling to face the horror of a lifetime without us.

I see the good Shepherd doing whatever it takes
to find His lost sheep
and bring it safely home.
The way that anguished woman longed for her husband
and did everything she could to find him
is the same way that God longs for each of us
and will not stop
until we are safely home.

May God's great, huge heart
comfort all of those who still grieve losses from that day
and give us courage to live for peace.

10 Things I Know about Beauty (Max prompt)

1. It's really, really hard to maintain physical beauty when you get old and your feet hurt. You look haggard and you feel cranky.

2. Then there's the beauty of the home - also hard to maintain with paper clutter piles and chipped paint on the walls and the leavings from too many exhausted days all strewn together.

3. Take nature. Maybe there's a rustic beauty when weeds have overtaken the land to the point that you cannot walk through the bramble, but it takes a fairly primitive sort to appreciate that.

4. Carefully tended outdoor beauty is actually rather nice - freshly mowed grass, weeded gardens, ponds with trickling water to induce a more relaxed and meditative state.

5. A lot of exterior beauty is hard to maintain - bodies, homes, yards - but so is inner beauty. People aren't just born beautiful in the inside. They have to work at it.

6. The best way to develop inner beauty is first to witness it. You have to see someone who is beautiful on the inside, someone who glows a little, who smiles and shows kindness. That kind of beauty beckons and causes desire to grow within.

7. We can ask for beauty - ask God to grow within us and and help form us that way. But then we have to be ready to act on the guidance we receive that is sometimes painful - like forgiving mean and nasty people who wreck havoc in our lives. Only then do we become beautiful.

8. We must be vigilant in caring for and loving beauty or it quickly slips away.

9. Beauty is the clearest sign we have of God's presence on earth - other than kindness. But kindness is beauty.

10. Grace, love, peace, harmony, goodness, gentleness - all the noble virtues are beautiful.