All the beautiful things I want to do
Borrowing from friends
“Before I even get out of bed I am filled with dread for all the beautiful things I want to do.”
This past week my thoughts have felt like confetti, like a million pieces of potentially beautiful things sprung into the air for a brief moment of joy, only to be cleaned up or considered litter in the morning. Nothing sticks together or feels all that important, sort of like a wasted extravagance. I go to the keyboard dutifully, or the notebook or the Notes app—I try not to be particular these days—and garbage comes out. The beauty dissipates as soon as I try to share it.
To be fair to myself, it’s probably not all garbage. The problem is that I am comparing my words with the gravity of a world on fire, and writing anything just feels like levity these days. And we need levity, breaths of air, breaks in the seriousness. But the question keeps coming back: what is the point?
When I read this from Laura this week—Before I even get out of bed I am filled with dread for all the beautiful things I want to do—I knew exactly what it meant to me. I knew the feeling of a day off and too many goodnesses to cram into not enough time. What a world! What a dreadful celebration of life.
Sometimes when I think about dying, which happens more regularly as we age, naturally—sometimes when I think about dying I am filled with dread for all the beautiful things I still want to do. If I didn’t believe in a resurrection, a good God, an eternity with a God who is capable of everything beyond all I can ask or imagine, that dreaded thought would make sense. If this life is the one shot then I’d better squeeze every drop of goodness out of it because the end is The End. This is all I get. I used to be sad to think of all I will miss when I’m dead and now I kinda think ya know, I’ll be happy to miss so much of this world. No more strife or struggle or tears seems pretty appealing.
But here I am in this life, with so many beautiful things I want to do and so much beauty requiring witness. I write words as an expert witness, multiplying views. Mine. Yours. We can look together, and the good things of earth can grow bright against the darkness, when we gather our perspectives together in the direction of goodness.
Like this story from Callie, ending with this line:
And we’re all awful until we’re not.
One perspective is that we must love the world God created and the creatures who inhabit it less if we are going to do our duty to love God more, as if we have a finite amount of love in our tiny Grinch hearts, rather than an infinite Spirit at home in us as we make homes in the world. As if we could only love “while supplies last”. As if love were oil that must be conserved.
I hold to another perspective: The love of God has been poured out on us abundantly by his Spirit—gushing, running greedily out. When you love more, you love more. All my heart, soul, mind and strength are enlisted in this love, and it comes from a renewable source.
It doesn’t really matter if confetti is an extravagant waste that falls to the ground and instantly becomes trash. For a few moments it was fun and exciting and brought delight to some soul, even if only to the one throwing it. That’s worth something.
Let the point be that there are still too many beautiful things to be done, too much goodness to sit on our hands.
Feeling many of the same things lately, and also thinking a lot about the expanse of eternity, and time for everything….
"gushing, running greedily out" - what an image. I'll hold onto that perspective, too.
(and thanks for the shout-out - I'm grateful you liked that little piece)