Category: Eternity Page 1 of 3

Cultivating Beauty is How To Force Back the Darkness

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On July 23, 2025

In Eternity, What I'm Learning

What beauty is teaching me about finding hope and purpose

My first week of my first year away at college, I went to Target and bought decorations for my dorm room. I bought imitation ivy to pin to the walls and artificial flowers that matched my quilt. I probably spent about twenty dollars, and afterward I felt very guilty, which is probably the only reason I remember this inconsequential event.

My particular brand of youthful idealism centered around sacrifice. I had already wrestled greatly with the decision to spend the time and money to attend college when people were dying (literally and spiritually) all over the world. But I was an intensely practical young woman, so I was convinced by my parents’ argument that I would be more useful for the kingdom of God with a higher education. 

However, decorations for my room? Totally superfluous. A child was starving to death in Sudan while I bought plastic ivy. Making my room beautiful felt excessive, extravagant, and therefore, selfish.

Though stewardship is still important to me, I had a lot to learn about beauty. Contrary to my youthful pragmatism, beauty is not purposeless. God created beauty; it reflects him, and my instinct to cultivate it is a part of his image in me. 

Planting hope

I go to my garden in the evenings when my work is finished and the air is cool, and I am soul weary. The news of the day had crept out of dark corners like fire ants, biting, leaving welts: the bombings, the deportations, those starving children in Sudan. The heaviness of a friend with chronic illness or a husband who left, or my worries for my children, are like stubborn weeds that spring up unbidden, refusing to release, spreading, sucking up the life around them.  

But then I notice tiny green filaments pushing up through dark soil, and with it comes an inexplicable surge of hope. Each successive day brings something new to see, to examine, and I water and watch as fragile stems metamorphose into poppies, gladiolas, daisies, black-eyed susans. The sunflowers stretch and peek over the fence. Lillies open their mouths and sing, faces to the sky. The hummingbirds and bees dance in a delighted frenzy of indecision. And suddenly I am no longer so heavy. 

I dig my fingers in deep and pull out the weeds at the root, while somehow the exquisite detail of the purple larkspur seeps into my soul. As I force back what’s dead and lifeless to make room for Eden to flourish, suddenly the world doesn’t seem so dark. 

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It Could Have Been Me

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On January 11, 2025

In Eternity

My friend Lucy in Tanzania sent me this text this morning: Habari za leo, dada. Nyumbani kwako ni sawa? Ninaomba kwa wewe sana. Upo wapi?

Roughly translated: How are you, sister? Is your house okay? I am praying hard for you. Where are you located?

When a friend from the other side of the world, who gets her news from local Tanzanian radio, knows about the fires in Southern California, that’s when you know you know the events happening around you are a big deal. 

I woke up on Wednesday morning to the howling of sirens and the smell of smoke and looked out my second-story window to see a dark plume in the distance. 

“It looks close,” I told Gil. “But I know the mountains can play tricks on you.” The mountains surrounding us on three sides had been on fire in September (over 40,000 acres in the end). Those fires had seemed close too, but stayed miles away.

I jumped onto Facebook and saw my local community groups buzzing with chatter. I was right this time – the fire was close. The Moose Lodge, not half a mile from our house, was engulfed in flames. 

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Maybe Christmas Isn’t Supposed To Be About Joy

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On December 10, 2024

In Eternity, What I'm Learning

Norman Rockwell, 1949 Source

I don’t know about you, but the older I get, the more I feel like I’m walking in darkness. People say the world is getting darker, but when I contemplate all the horrors of the past that I have not experienced (World Wars, the Great Depression, a pre-antibiotic or anesthesia world), I will venture to guess that an intensifying darkness is only my perception. The world has always been dark. And since I had an abuse-free childhood, it makes sense that with age and wisdom comes a deepening understanding of the depth of the evil that has always shadowed the earth. Shadows my own heart. 

Of course, I love more people more intensely than I used to, and thus, the more burdens I carry. I keep thinking that once my children are healthy, thriving, and successfully launched into the world, some burdens will be relieved. Until that is, I hear folks in the season above me praying for their grandchildren. Even Paul, who experienced shipwrecks and floggings, starvation and prison, lists his concern for those he loved and invested in as perhaps the heaviest burden of all (II Cor. 11:27-28). 

It’s too bad that so often, the emphasis at Christmas is on all those warm fuzzy feelings that go along with family and parties and merry-making. We imagine that our lives in December should look like one big Norman Rockwell painting or Hallmark movie; when it doesn’t, those images mock us. How dare they look so happy when the world is so heavy? Maybe I’m just not in the Christmas spirit this year, we think. 

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I Want More

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On November 11, 2024

In American Worldview, Eternity

My mom tells the story of taking my brother and me to a Christmas event at the American Embassy in Liberia. I had just turned seven and had lived in Liberia for a year. There was a Santa at that party, and he asked Paul and me what we wanted for Christmas. We sat perched on his knee, completely stumped, unable to think of a single thing. There was no question in our young minds that we wanted Christmas presents. But since a year had separated us from television, Toys R Us, and the Sears catalog, we couldn’t possibly imagine what we wanted those gifts to be. 

My kids used to be the same way. But after four years in America? They can fill up an Amazon wishlist like nobody’s business.

When we moved into our new house a year after we arrived in California, I fretted over the laminate flooring, which is light brown on the bottom floor and dark brown from the stairs up, and gazed disapprovingly at the bedroom doors which look like they’ve been patched over several times by miscreant children. That is, until Gil gazed disbelievingly at me and reminded me that this house is way nicer than anything we’ve ever lived in, and what on earth had happened to me?

America happened to me, that’s what. 

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I am 46

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On December 22, 2022

In Eternity

This month I turned 46 and every third grader knows that 46 rounds up to 50. I am officially middle-aged. 

I know I’m supposed to have wrinkles but I worry if I’m supposed to have this many wrinkles. I have an expressive face which makes the dentist think she’s torturing me but really I’m just being expressive, and all that expression means a lot of wrinkles. But I’ve discovered that if you just reduce the lighting in your bathroom, half the wrinkles go away. I should market this on Shark Tank.

When I was young, my Gram told me I had good eyes. We would sit in her downstairs family room with the rust-and-gold-patterned carpet and she would do her bead crafts. I would crawl around on the floor and pick up the beads she had dropped and she told me I had good eyes. But the other day I was trying to thread a needle and reluctantly got out my reading glasses because I couldn’t see the darn thing. Apparently, I don’t have good eyes anymore. A kid spotted me with the glasses on and told me they made me look like a grandma and now that kid is locked in his room. 

Here I am, caught in a life that feels like it should be eternal but every moment is only a second long. I live with the passage of time every minute of every day and yet it still surprises me. Every Christmas I exclaim that I can’t believe it’s already Christmas and every time I see a baby, I am surprised by how fast that baby has grown. I greatly anticipate the upcoming vacation or party, and then suddenly it’s over. I yearned for the baby to be potty-trained and the child to make her own sandwiches and the teenager to graduate but then I get there and look back with wistfulness. 

So here I am at 46 and determined to no longer be surprised by the passage of time. Instead I find myself frantically grasping as it slips through my fingers. Johnny is my last child to be in elementary school, so my children are no longer young. On his birthday, he wanted me to physically bring his cupcakes to school instead of sending them with him, so I majorly inconvenienced myself and did it just because it was the last time. 

My children don’t need me to brush their teeth anymore, but they need me to drive them and that makes me miss the brushing-teeth years. One evening when Gil was sick, I made two trips to school, two trips to church, and two trips to the soccer fields. In one evening. Won’t it be nice when in a few years we have our evenings back? I asked Gil. Yet simultaneously my heart beat empty at the thought of empty spaces at the dinner table, empty bedrooms. No. It won’t be nice at all, actually. It sounds dreadful. 

My years of influence over them are flitting away like dandelion fluff. I think about how Grace will be able to drive on her own soon, and how nice that will be, and then I think about how I won’t get to hear her chats on the way home, and I don’t think that will be nice at all, actually. I think I want the future but really I want it to stay here, right now, in this moment. But I never get that. 

By age 46, you would think I would be used to this already, but it’s like there’s something in my soul that knows that one day the Joy will arrive and time will stop and it will go on forever and ever. Perhaps that’s because I am a soul who is trapped in a linear existence but was created for eternity. And one day I’ll get there. 

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