Pain Magnifies Beauty
Alicia Wright
Beauty, joy, and worship start to feel concentrated in the face of pain. Maybe because they’re opposites in a very real way. The world’s brokenness is the opposite of what God created, yet it retains beauty and joy, which are aspects of God, in a million big and small ways. Our bodies are broken like the rest of the world, and wait along with the rest of creation (Romans 8) for his return, because we know his presence will heal our physical pain and our hearts. But it won't just erase pain, (as wonderful as that will be!), no, it will make us completely and fully free to do exactly what we were created to do - worship and delight in his presence forever. That won’t be just freedom from pain. It will be the opposite of pain. It will be literal perfection, unspeakable joy, because it is the very essence of what we were made to be and do.
There isn’t a happiness higher or joy greater than perfection, unless it’s perfection with the realization that there was imperfection before. Rest after a long day feels better than the rest that has overstayed it’s welcome and become boredom or restlessness. A truly loving, enjoyable, relationship is something you savor deeply when you’ve seen (or experienced) the opposite. Spring feels delightful because it slowly pushes open the door to bring warmth and new growth after a cold, dreary, winter. Easter feels truly victorious because it comes after the sorrow of Good Friday. The gospel is like that. It’s only truly, life-changingly, beautiful when we’ve stared into the deep depths of our sin, shrunk back in horror at what we saw, then caught a glimpse of Jesus Himself.
In Tolkien’s creation story, he describes how the Creator made good from the evil that was actively sown by intentional destruction. From sorrow comes greater beauty than before. Cold without bounds is sown, but from it the Creator brings snow, beautiful frosts, icy landscapes, etc. From the ravaging destruction of fires, shaped in anger comes warmth and protection. Similarly, as believers, we know that there is no destruction or pain brought about by the will of the evil one that is not bent to the will of our loving Heavenly Father.
Noticing the beauty that is heightened in the sorrow of life is not an invitation to “find a reason” or to minimize pain. Pain is the result of sin and brokenness. It has no good in and of itself. It did not exist in God’s perfect creation of the world, and it will be completely destroyed and fully eliminated when Christ returns. He didn’t make it, and He won’t keep it around when He makes all things new. Don’t go down the road of trying to “find the good” in the pain itself. There is no good in sin and its result: death, brokenness, and pain.
But there is great good in God.
There is a never-ending well of delight in Christ our Savior and elder Brother. There are eternal depths of good in our Heavenly Father. There is abiding good in our Comforter, the Spirit who walks with us in our pain, grief, and death.
Pain in and of itself is evil. It is a waste. It is a destruction of the perfection and beauty that God made, by the evil one who hated God because he could not attain God’s glory and goodness. But God didn’t draw back and let Satan hold sway over all that he had destroyed. No, God had already set the wheels in motion for a plan He had created before the beginning of time (Acts 2). In this plan He brings beauty into the brokenness. He shines light in the darkness. The pain feels very much the same, but there is something added. Beauty. Beauty in the greenness and growth of spring after winter, beauty in the way a perfect apple fritter tastes with a well-roasted cup of coffee, and beauty in the way a little one snuggles up to you just to say, “hi, mommy.” There’s beauty in the warmth of a roaring fireplace in the middle of winter, and beauty in a day of lessened pain where you were able to do a few things you couldn’t the day before. But most of all, there’s a well of unending, inexhaustible, beauty in a gospel that takes us at our worst, our most broken, and gives us Christ Himself. From the suffering and death of Jesus we see that as horrific as pain is, God can use it as a vehicle to show us His beauty magnified by that very pain. Even the greatest of our physical and mental pain here on earth becomes “a light and momentary” thing when we compare it to “the weight of glory” coming in the presence of our Savior.