Beauty surrounds us these Christmas days, but what beauty will touch your deepest yearnings? For what does your soul yearn? Is it that new exercise machine, the gift card, a new outfit, the latest tech device, or whatever shiny gift you hope to receive? Commercials and advertisements dumb down our yearning for beauty, and many empty souls content themselves with today’s gift that will be tomorrow’s junk. “‘Vanity of vanities,’ says the Preacher” (Ecclesiastes 1:2).Don’t you and I aspire to something higher?
The architects of great cathedrals designed sanctuaries to call people beyond themselves to Someone higher. Your Creator “has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). The lights shining in your decorated home, your church decorated for wonder by young and old, the beautiful things we put up and will take down, all invite our yearnings for the hidden God to break into our lives with beauty that will fill us with awe. His beauty shines with wisdom in place of today’s barrage of information, life and immortality in place of our slow dying and final death, and unity among peoples and nations to replace our divisions. “Break forth, O beauteous heavenly light and usher in the morning” (Lutheran Service Book, 378, 1). Isn’t this the prayer of our deepest yearnings?
“O Emmanuel, our king and our Lord, the anointed for the nations and their Savior: Come and save us, O Lord our God” (The final O Antiphon).
“Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness: He was manifest in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory” (1 Timothy 3:16). “Seek the Lord while he may be found’ call upon him while he is near” (Isaiah 55:6). May Immanuel, God with us, bring eternal beauty to your heart and life!
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