Agonizing Beauty

This video is an amazing portrait of perspective. I admit, that at the onset I was annoyed by the singer's voice. The delivery is grating. My senses were irked with each missed key. As my frustration mounted from the music, I became more aware of another aggravation, which grew from my inability to make out the picture created on the canvas. As a matter of fact, at one point I even played with the idea of muting the speakers on my laptop, just so that I could focus on deciphering the image in the painting.

These feelings, as earnest as they are harsh, are not easy to admit. In fact being in that space, or even admitting my discomfort only made my total experience with this video all the more poignant. After all, I would never have been able to grasped the power exuded from that final frame, had I never been annoyed or dissatisfied with the clips opening shots.

This video illustrates such a profound metaphor for life, and how I sometimes start a thing without the end in mind. Hope abruptly turns into distress. Or maybe I have a clear vision for my destination, but I am a little foggy on the details and how the final picture will emerge. Still perhaps I've entered into a new relationship or partnership, and the connections just don't seem to come together as quickly as I had hoped. In these moments, it is easy to lose sight of the big picture.

I'm sure Abraham knew what it meant to agonize over God-sized Perspective in Genesis 22 when God sent him to the land of Moriah-- a name transliterated from the root words ra'ah {raw-aw'} meaning to see, look, or perceive and Yahh {yaw} meaning the same as Jah (Jehovah in the shortened form). The pinnacle of Abraham's walk of faith came when God commanded Abraham to go to the land of Jehovah's perception.

Life can seem like little more than a canvas having amassed a jumble of incongruous strokes, and whose boundaries are so finite, that I am often rendered deaf or blind. I become so fixed on trying to make out the picture, that I cannot even see how God is moving all around me. Or I concentrate so much on my hardship that I am no longer encouraged by praise and worship music, which echo the very Word of God. This video reminds me to trust God more deeply and to see as God sees.