I love this view of the Steeples Range. I often stop here. I took this about a month ago when the grass was still rich and green.

But there’s a reason it’s so green -and why there is a place to pull off the highway. There’s a pump house near this spot. It pumps effluent from the nearby town onto the field as a way of dealing with sewage.

In others words it makes something beautiful out of something, well, considerably less than beautiful.

My parents used to love the Gaither show on TV. At least I think that’s what it’s called. The Gaithers created a bit of a revolution in the style of music we were used to in church back in the 70’s. There was a level of honesty and joy in the reality of grace and the goodness of God we hadn’t seen for a while. The music gave Mom and Dad a lot of comfort. Dad still plays it. I remember the words of one song:

Something beautiful, something good
All my confusion He understood
All I had to offer Him was brokenness and strife
But he made something beautiful of my life

If there ever were dreams
That were lofty and noble
They were my dreams at the start
And hope for life’s best were the hopes
That I harbor down deep in my heart
But my dreams turned to ashes
And my castles all crumbled, my fortune turned to loss
So I wrapped it all in the rags of life
And laid it at the cross.

Something beautiful, something good
All my confusion He understood
All I had to offer Him was brokenness and strife
But he made something beautiful of my life.

Many of us have been stopped in our tracks by disappointment in ourselves. The stuff that comes out of me sometimes is truly embarrassing.

Lord if you can use my mistakes somehow, you can have them. You said to give you everything, because you paid for it, and I don’t want to even admit some of this to myself, let alone have it flung out where everybody can see it, but here you go. I’ve done and said some pretty unpleasant things in my life, and I feel ugly sometimes, OK a lot of the time. But you can use anything, even my shame. So here. I lay it all down. The accomplishments, the failures. They’re yours. I know you can make something beautiful out of them.