On Good News and Evangelism

What if Beauty came first?

Lane in the Poppy Fields, Claude Monet

What if Beauty came first, and not lists, ways to err, options for punishment?

What if evangelism was Good News and good news was a nuthatch clinging to the bark of the towering fir tree out your window, or the sun warming the earth in April so the dahlias can be planted?

Good News is the beauty of a fairy tale, a myth, a metaphor that tells your real life and peels layers away and restores unencumbered time.

Good News is a tulip opening full on your table, its black eye staring at you, dropping a petal each day, a petal each day, as you enjoy all its natural stages and how you didn’t even work for that beauty, and would never dream of altering it. Planting a bulb in fall may be on a checklist, but it is not work. It’s play, a child’s vocation, and in spring you reap wages on something forgotten, some unremembered calling you or some long ago gardener followed one fall because inside, in your own soil, you know the fairy tale is true. 

Dead things come to life with a kiss. 

What if Beauty was the first representation of Christ to you, winging in like a red-winged blackbird, a voice like trickling water, a startling flash of sunset red and yellow in the dark? Like stones dropped in empty wells, just for the sound that will never run out, never run out. Just for the feel. Just because.

What if evangelism was identifying all the bugs and blossoms in spring, naming them, storing them in a book of beauty for the winter months to come? What if, when the cedar waxwings came in a mad-rushing crowd to pillage the cedar berries out your second story window, someone said to you this is the gospel and everyone can come; this is the Good News and it’s good for all, free, beauty you didn’t work for?

Good News is the born beauty of the child-you, layered deep inside the truth telling adult-you, the you who knows what she knew all along: God made the world and everything in it. He called it good and that includes you.

Good News is: Beauty does come first. I hope you don’t have to spend so long removing the mordant cover, the responsible adulthood, the practical usefulness.