I must not be online enough...

I know that I'm not online as much when I'm relying on others to track down interesting things to read.

This was posted on a site that Kenny recently linked to on his blog. I enjoyed it.

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...I’ve come to believe that the sweetest sentence in the English language is not “I love you”: that one’s too simple; love is too often utterly blind. No, far sweeter are the words “you are not ugly to me.” I hear those words and think: really? Nahh, it isn’t possible. Too good to be true.

And then I read the rest of Job’s story, and I think: Far from being this awful tale of a cold God gambling over his creatures’ pain, this may be the kindest, most loving story I’ve ever read, short of the gospels themselves. For what happens at the tale’s end? God wraps His arms around the ugly one, the one who picks at his sores in the ashes. He calls him “my servant Job” – makes him a member of the divine Household. Beauty and ugliness are turned upside down, inside out.

I think this is an important piece of redemption that contemporary Christian culture mostly misses. We’re very big these days on the idea that Jesus died for my sins – and He did, and that matters enormously. But more is going on here than a transaction involving the Creator, lots of individual creatures, and a balance sheet. Supreme ugliness entered the universe a very long time ago, and attached itself to us and to our world in the deepest ways imaginable. Inexpressible Beauty could have turned His back on all of it, but He didn’t: He wrapped His arms around it – more amazing still, he dove into the worst of it, swam in it, emerged with it dripping from His very pores. And, somehow, the ugliness itself was changed. A line from The Shawshank Redemption captures the point remarkably well. Red describes Andy Dufresne’s escape, which required him to crawl through a long sewer line to get out of the prison complex. “He crawled through a river of shit, and came out clean on the other side.” That gets it right, I think. Times like this, I see myself, just a little, as Andy Dufresne, looking up at that cleansing rain. Only I'm not the one who crawled through that nasty river. Someone else did it before me, and for me.