It was my senior year in college. I was away student-teaching, but I was headed to a conference about an hour away. My old, beat-up red Dodge Coronet was chugging along, and I had the radio blaring, and of course, I was singing quite loudly, enjoying the fall sunshine.
The day was absolutely amazing. I couldn’t get over the exquisite beauty of the crystal clear sky. It was that aqua blue, like the Caribbean Ocean, and like the ocean, it stretched out before me for as far as I could see. God’s perfection, right there on display, an absolutely fabulous fall day. I was so taken by the magnificence of the sky that I did something totally uncharacteristic for me: I turned off the radio! Usually I loved to sing along with every song, but today, I was so impressed at God’s beauty that I just had to revel in it in silence.
The sun, shining in through the windshield, warmed my body and spirit, and I began to pray out loud, something I had never really done before. I began truly praising God for this exquisiteness before me. But as I was praying, I noticed a jet crossing what had been a chaste, unadulterated sky. The contrails left behind by its exhaust caused this sharp white streak to mar the beauty. Then another jet marked the sky. Then another. The once completely beautiful sky had become a complete mess of strikes across the cobalt canvass.
Like a knife, the message was ruthlessly clear: those streaks that had completely changed the sky, mirrored what I had done in my life, how I had completely changed what God had intended. I was the sky – marred, tainted, defaced. My praise turned to anguish with tears blurring my vision. “I ruined what you had planned for me, God! The beauty you could have shown in me is lost.” I was overcome with remorse. My body shook with silent sobs. Honestly I don’t know how I didn’t wreck the car, yet somehow I stayed in my lane and kept driving. Over and over, with growing despair, I felt the crushing truth of what I was, a hopeless sinner. I drove on, feeling the weight of sin. I “cry-prayed,” and at times, I didn’t even know what I was saying, but every sob was issuing remorse, regret, guilt, and sorrow. My tears had pooled in my lap, and I could no longer keep up with wiping them away. I felt so broken.
For miles and miles I drove on. I just kept uttering, “I’m so sorry, Lord. I’m so sorry.” I stopped looking up at the sky. It was just an ugly reminder of the mess I had made of my life. I simply stared straight ahead at the gray road before me. Finally, the flow of tears stopped. I was drained of emotion. I sat there, numbly staring at the white lines of the road passing by. The silence was deafening.
Then… then I heard the softest, gentlest sound to my broken soul. “Look up…. Just look up.” I didn’t want to, but I lifted my eyes to the disfigured sky. The man-made marks were still there, but they had begun to dissipate, which created a soft, billowing effect. The once straight slashes now rolled out like cotton, like drifts of snow. "Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool." Isaiah 1:18
It was a new beauty, different, yet remarkable in its own rite. The man-made pollution had become surprisingly picturesque. I heard it as if it had been spoken aloud – His voice saying, “I can take the mistakes and make them beautiful. I am the creator, after all. I am the master artist. What Satan meant for bad, I can take and make good.” I remembered a quote I had heard, “Satan knows your name and calls you by your sin. God knows your sin and calls you by your name.”
I didn’t think I had any tears left until they started falling again! But this time they were tears of joy. Flowing, washing, erasing. No, not erasing. The marks were still there, but they had changed. They weren’t filled with remorse; they were filled with promise. I couldn’t change what had already been done, but I could put the streaks in God’s hands and wait and watch and wonder at the beauty He could make. When I handed over my life to Christ’s forgiveness, my life was no longer my story. It became His story – His story transforming my story into grace and beauty. "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come." 2 Corinthians 5:17
So, I arrived at my destination, way early. (So much for following the speed limit! Yikes!) And I literally felt light! A weight had been lifted off of me. I went into the convention center, which was basically empty. People had not yet begun to arrive. As I walked toward the registration table, an older gentleman was walking towards me to head out of the building. Our eyes briefly met, and I nodded a hello, but he stopped and touched my arm. “Excuse me, Miss, but have you ever heard of the Presence of God?” he asked me. Strange, I was thinking, but I nodded and he continued, “In the Bible it talks about how Moses shone with the Presence of God after his encounter on the mountain.” I kind of nodded in agreement, but I didn’t really understand why he was telling me this. “Well, you have that presence. Your face is just shining like you’ve encountered God!” He smiled and walked on, but I was grounded to my spot. I had had an encounter with God, and I knew I would never be the same. What’s more, someone else, a perfect stranger, just witnessed the billowing snow of the contrails in my life. The broken imperfections had served to showcase God’s masterpiece: devastation transformed by His Presence. The chapters of my life get to showcase His forgiveness, His healing, His beauty. The breaking had become the healing, and in the healing I would get to showcase God.
Ephesians 2:10 For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things He planned for us long ago.
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