God Makes Everything Beautiful

One of the themes behind the novel I’m currently working on deals with the consequence of sin. Cheery subject, isn’t it? That’s book writing for you. There’s no story without conflict.

My 1880s hero is living an isolated life as a consequence of his sin. He stole quite a bit of money in his youth, and has lived with the secret ever since. His sin was never discovered—well, at least not yet—and so the consequences he’s living with are entirely self-imposed.

In contrast, my flawed but virtuous heroine’s goal is to offer a place of refuge and shelter to women who’ve had to resort to prostitution in a time and place when women had few choices. Many of the women she wants to minister to are dealing with consequences of their sin, but some have suffered misfortune because of someone else’s sin. In other words, they’ve found themselves thrust into such a life not because they wanted it, but because they had no other choice.

That’s what I’m finding so sadly interesting. That people can suffer consequences but not always because of their own doing. I think that’s one of the reasons there are not only bitter people in the world, but unbelieving ones: the problem of suffering. Why does God allow good people to suffer? Children? The innocent?

Scholars have attempted to answer this question for generations, and one way of looking at it is that God set up a faith-based system of life, one that includes free will. Choice and freedom can bring good and wonderful things, but it can also bring the opposite. On a grand scale, sin is what started all of the problems of this world. On an individual scale, sometimes either our choices or the choices of others bring suffering. But faith is the greatest benefit—either we choose to love God or we don’t. Without that free will there would be no choice at all, and apparently with imperfect human beings you can’t have free will without suffering.

While I was contemplating this subject, I heard a song from Rebecca St. James about how God makes everything beautiful—even our pain and failures. Somehow I found that comforting, both personally and for my character’s sake. The phrase helped me see that if we reach out to God in our suffering, it becomes a sacred moment. Something precious to Him, because it becomes a tool to draw us closer to Him.

The song begins by reminding us of how easy it is to worship a God as generous as ours, one Who has given us so many natural gifts. We see Him in sunrises and sunsets, in the beauty and variety of plants and animals around us. I even see Him in the wag of my dog’s tail—what a profound gift!

But this song made me see that He can also make those hard moments in life beautiful, too, because it’s perhaps in those moments when He is the most real to us. And that’s as beautiful to Him as it should be to us.

One last thought before clicking on the song: There is absolutely nothing beautiful in the suffering Christ did on the cross—if that was all it was. But it wasn’t just a brutal death, it was a complete and utter sacrifice of a God Who loves what He created. Us. And in that is utter beauty.