I love watching my daughter dance – the arc of her arm, the angle of her body mid-leap.
She becomes something ‘other’, as well as her most beautiful self.
Sometimes when she’s dancing, my gaze drifts to her teacher, always attentive. And I wish I could see with her eyes, for she envisioned the grace now on display; created the beauty my daughter now dances. And as life gets faster- busier, I drink in the moments when I can just sit and watch. Entranced.

Also, challenged. Because whenever I see beauty come to life, I feel a nudge. A stirring. For, just as my daughter Alina dances beauty to life, I’ve been made to do that too.
Beneath all the things I have -to -need-to-do, what am I living for? What legacy will I leave?

One of the outstanding classics to emerge from the Holocaust is Viktor Frankl’s story of his struggle for survival in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. His story is less about what he suffered and lost, than it is about the sources of his strength to survive. He describes how the prisoners with no hope for the future, were inevitably the first to die. Often the strongest physically, they died less from lack of food or medicine, than from lack of something to live for. Several times during his book Frankl quotes Nietzsche, “He who has a Why to live for, can bear almost any How.”
Man’s inner strength, and ultimate purpose, raises him above his outward fate. Or not.

Purpose. It picks us up and keeps us going. May I take you to where I found mine?

4,543 billion years ago. It’s dark. Lightless. Void.
But then – a Presence, hovering over the deep. And, through the darkness, an intention is voiced.
Eternal Beauty is going to create. And create in a staggering, risk-filled way,
“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” Let’s make a copy of Us. An image bearer.
The created will reflect the Creator. Swell with Him. Spill Him.
A beginning. A bang. A creation which recreates itself. A mathematical order at the universe’s heartbeat. A perfect PHI factor written into all beauty. Majesty. Intricacy. Design. Infinite patience. Dimension after dimension of beauty unfolding, as this huge God mystery puzzle lets the weight of Himself unfold through nature’s looking glass.
His world and the way He made it, pointing to Him.

And the image bearer? He gives us nothing less than His very essence. Our own will. We get to choose. Really.
Viktor Frankl writes of man’s self-determination as evidenced even in the most unthinkable conditions man can face. “In the concentration camps, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we witnessed some of our comrades behave like swines, others, like saints…we who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. Every hour offered the opportunity to make a decision whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom. Man always decides. What he becomes, in the next moment, within the limits of endowment and environment, is what he has made out of himself.”

But there’s an attack on beauty. There always is, no? A liar and a lie – that beauty begins with us. And we believe the liar. We choose. God lets us. He must. And our wrong choice cuts us off from Him; enslaves us.
We’re trapped. Only He can break the choice-robbing power we’re now under.

How? A power play? Sure, He could. But, how to break the power, without just stepping in and taking back control; voiding our choices’ consequences? How to honour our wrong choices, but free us? A seemingly impossible feat.

And that’s how we come to the most upside-down vision of beauty and power, that’s incredible to so many.
There He is, at the foot of the hill. Stumbling. Bloodied.
What on earth’s going on. This God come down is hardly able to stand. Broken.
But, his face? Flint -like. Set not only against the lashings and the pain, but against the forces set against us. His likeness. His creation.
He falls. Gets up again.
Before you were, I am. Before you chose wrong, I chose you. Before you fell, I loved you. I purposed you. To become like Me. Perfect in love. Self-giving. Self-determining. Before time began, I knew you. And I will not leave you where you are.

He’s down again. Naked, lacerated. And then, God is impaled and raised up on a cross.
And there’s the heart of it. The double-edged sword, that perhaps evil didn’t see coming, who knows.

Everlasting Love has accomplished the seemingly impossible.

He’s found a way to honour our choices, without leaving us to their consequences. He’s become us, taken the weight of our choosing. He’s died, instead of us; allowed evil to collude against Him, instead of us.

And dying in our place, he’s shown us our extraordinary value.

And as we gaze at this human face, surrounded by a crown of thorns – God gasping on a cross – we see, in the weakness and the impaling, His unequaled, utter beauty. In One Thousand Gifts, Ann Voskamp writes of how the French try to capture this paradoxical “ ugly-beautiful”. They call it “d’un beau affreux”; the Germans, “ hubsch-hasslich”, and painter Paul Gaugin expressed it as “Le laid peut être beau”. That which is perceived as ugly, transfigured into beautiful.
In His broken humanity, His image crystallizes in the utter, extraordinary co -suffering, self-giving love of God.
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son…And the Son so loved the Father. that he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross”. As Dante puts it, His is “the Love which moves the sun and the other stars”.

The God portrait is redrawn; a new sort of power let loose upon the world.
Yes, you are priceless. And the most important thing you can do with your priceless self, is to give it away.
And the power of this love raised up on a cross, shifts something in the cosmos. It’s a revolutionary act. Worldly power is overthrown by the death of Jesus, partly because in it, He is powerless. True love lays itself down for the beloved.

It’s late and I’m reading in bed. My teenage son peers around the door, comes to sit on my bed.
“Mum?”
“Mmmh…?” Distractedly, I look up, book in hand.
“What do you think I should do with my life?”

I have a thousand words, and yet so few, for this beautiful boy of mine.
I tell him, not of what I’ve always lived, but what I’m learning, because this Jesus I have discovered is certainly not the reflection of my own face.

Be you. Choose. Innovate. Create. Be free. Go where your gifts lead you. Never compare yourself with another man or his destiny. Every life, every moment, asks something different of each of us.

When you find that it’s in your destiny to suffer, you may have to accept this as your take, your task. No one can suffer in your place; your opportunity lies in the way you bear your burden. Other times, if the suffering is bent against you, you must fight it; or fight for others, and everything that’s preventing them from discovering what it means for them to be human.

In your choosing, remember freedom is not the last word, only part of the story, and half the truth.
For beauty lays claim to us. With gifts, choice and freedom, comes responsibility.
What will be the monument of your existence? What realities of work done, love loved, and suffering bravely suffered, will you leave behind?

And , in all your living, may you have one ultimate goal: to be His face, that plays in ten thousand places.
May all that is beauty in you, be only His reflection.
May He be your Why. As you were His.

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As Kingfishers Catch Fire
BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.