beautiful

The sky out this window is growing light now. A faint pink at the horizon fades up to blue.  We have come away for two nights to celebrate our tenth anniversary. We are giddy with freedom!

I look out at the early morning sky from the anonymity of this hotel room, and I could be anywhere. I love that feeling. As if I am disengaged from my life, floating above the world, watching. That’s where the stories are.

Yesterday was my birthday and I spent the first moments of it in the kitchen after midnight, cleaning up from the day before. I was thinking about it being my birthday, and suddenly my heart bubbled with joy and I found myself singing.

Something beautiful, something good,

all my confusion, he understood.

All I had to offer him was brokenness and strife,

but he made something, beautiful, out of my life.

As you know, I had a fairly complicated childhood, and I’ve spent a lot of my life so far trying to figure myself out. I haven’t always understood or even liked myself. But through it all I've had a sense of being made, of something being made out of the raw material of my life. The gratefulness for that was what welled up within me in the early hours of Sunday morning. That song came straight from my heart, and it stayed with me as I slept and then began the day again.

After the excitement and exertion of the girls' party, my birthday was an after thought. We didn’t really do anything special, (other than come away to celebrate our anniversary!) But before we shifted house I found a beautiful second-hand dresser online and we bought it as a birthday present for me. Paddy went and picked it up two weekends before moving day, and, with a lot of effort, transported it to our new house, where the previous owners let us store it in the garage. On the way to the new house the top of the dresser completely came away as Paddy went around a corner, and it shattered on the ground. I got a phone call with the bad news. It was just furniture, but it was beautiful, and it was my birthday present. I cried.

I couldn’t bear to look at it for the first few weeks in the new house. I would go down to the garage and turn away as I walked past it. It sat, neglected. At one point water was leaking onto it from the ceiling and there it continued to sit, getting wet, until someone moved it. I went down to the garage to see how wet it had got and it was then that I actually stood in front of the dresser and looked at it. Even broken it was still very beautiful.

And then I saw myself, in that furniture. That sweet Rimu dresser which unbeknownst to us was only held together by three screws. Three screws which, no matter how carefully the dresser had been tied down, could not hold through nearly an hour’s driving and plenty of corners. I looked at it and in a flash I knew I was looking at myself.  

I’ve always felt as though I had a few design faults. Whether they developed as a result of  a complicated childhood, or whether they were just the quirks of my personality, I can’t be sure. I’ve been haunted by a feeling of different–ness, of being separate to the rest of the world. As if everybody else except me lived easily, made and kept friends, felt beautiful.

 Janet Frame’s fictional persona in “Faces in the Water” describes this as “a great gap… in the ice floe between myself and the other people whom I watched…with their world, drifting away… I was alone on the ice… a prisoner.” I don’t think you need to be suffering from severe mental illness, as Janet Frame was, to feel this. Probably most of us feel this way at some point in our lives.

So when I sing something beautiful, something good... I really mean what I’m singing. I’m familiar with brokenness and confusion, and if I am beautiful, if there is anything beautiful to come out of my life, I owe it all to God.

I realise this might make you uncomfortable, but I wouldn’t be writing those words here if I didn’t mean them. My whole life has been lived against the backdrop of an unshakable conviction that I am created and that my creator is merciful and loving. My ideas about God have changed enormously over the years. But one thing has never changed, and that is the sense that somehow, something beautiful is being made out of my life. I’m broken but beautiful.