Tag: Beauty

Perfect: A Blessing

Perfect

Perfect like no mistakes?

or perfect like a feather—

bent all directions, bendy, soft and misshapen.

Or perfect like sand, where every grain is unique, 

and together sand is sand 

and apart sand is sand

and it’s still identifiable and beautiful either way. 

Perfect like light or like shadow, that moves and changes

according to its circumstances,

and becomes more or less strong, but is always present, 

and can have hard or soft edges

—Depending.

Perfect, Perfect like a curled feather 

shining against the sand 

in the light

with a shadow.

Yeah, that kind of perfect.

(I hope your those kinds of perfect)

feel free to share/adapt/use with credit to Pastor Katy Stenta

I wrote this in my Creative Writing Class, if you want to support my writing please give at https://gofund.me/70a114f9

#God & #Dragons…God loves monsters…..YAYYYYYY

https://medium.com/@theboyonthebike/god-loves-monsters-4f727db3d046

Beautiful Theology over at theboyonthebike

“The monster was not a threat to God. And while Job had become a threat to his friends, he wasn’t a threat to God either. The creature that the world called “monster,” God called “friend.” The beautiful part then is that the people the world calls “monster” (because their appearance, their story, their otherness feels monstrous to those around them) are the ones that God calls friend. All the things that made Leviathan so frightening to everyone else were what made Leviathan delightful to God. God celebrated all the wild things about Leviathan that made everyone else recoil in horror.”

“In fact, in an especially strange turn of the poem, in some translations God not only celebrates Leviathan — but identifies with Leviathan. Watch how God seems to casually move between how people respond to Leviathan and how they actually respond to Him in Job 41.9–11:”

Batman and Baptism

Baptism Message: You are beautiful and loved and perfect as a newborn naked baby, the more “Naked” you can be with God, the more you can share in the glory of Christ’s love (both reviewed in Skinny Dipping and Embodied Spirituality and Nakedness)…
Reality…Always be yourself, unless you can be Batman, then always be batman. This morning a batman costume helped to relieve any nerves during baptism….yep today I baptized batman..

Nakedness

A synopsis of Sunday’s Sermon

Naked Babies are beautiful–I’m pretty sure everyone can agree that naked babies are beautiful. Maybe this was why baptisms used to be done naked because (although a little dangerous) what is cuter than a naked baby?

God made us, as all good mothers, God made space for us and then formed us as a part of her lives…God made us naked babies, beautiful and perfect, and then Jesus offers us the spring of life.

God knows our own mother’s are not perfect, but there is great comfort in knowing that God fills in the gaps–God is the perfect parent, able to be both mother and father to us….

God thinks we’re beautiful…and invites us to baptism, to spirituality to swim fully in the glory of God.

And of course that means nakedness….

Removing all those loads and pieces of clothing that separate us from God. Fully claiming ourselves and our bodies in Christ (for more on this see my post on Skinny Dipping).

And when we get naked, we start to notice that our bodies are imperfect, there are scars, we have fat and wrinkles and everything doesn’t work right….so maybe we can only put our feet in, but whatever we can do to get some spirituality allows us to be loved. How can we participate in the River of Life.

I have a rule–every baby I see is the most beautiful baby in the world …And its true, every baby is a miracle, every baby is beautiful and so I know, for a fact that every baby is the most beautiful baby in the world.

We are God’s Babies. We are the most beautiful people in the universe, and that beauty comes from God! God’s glory and love is in us, and since Christ is in God we are in God’s glory (John 17). And God, as a good mother, doesn’t love us in spite of our faults, but including them. Seeing all our flaws, faults and cracks. God loves us, because we are the most beautiful children in the world–and we need to affirm that to one another. To look at one another and say–you are beautiful, just like naked babies are!

Soul Beauty

Embracing God and self identity, that’s what is about folks!

the beautiful changes...

In a world where too much ugliness happens every day–much of it on the internet for millions of eyes to see–let’s take a moment and celebrate how one young woman has transformed a moment of ugliness into one of beauty.

It all started when this photo, taken without the subject’s knowledge, was posted on a website that invited mocking and cruel comments.

Then this happened:

“Hey, guys. This is Balpreet Kaur, the girl from the picture. I actually didn’t know about this until one of my friends told on facebook. If the OP wanted a picture, they could have just asked and I could have smiled 🙂 However, I’m not embarrased or even humiliated by the attention [negative and positve] that this picture is getting because, it’s who I am. Yes, I’m a baptized Sikh woman with facial hair. Yes, I realize that my gender is often confused and I…

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