Of fallenness and beauty

I identified wholeheartedly with my brother's last post about his sweet baby's eczema.


I, too, marveled at the perfection of my newborns, including their beautiful baby-soft skin.  So when the angry red rash reared its ugly, itchy head, marring their perfect complexion, it was most distressing to me too.  I struggled to accept this flaw on *my perfect baby*.


In other words, I struggled to accept that *my* children are also fallen.


(This becomes easier to believe when they approach age two.)


Seeing the damaging effects of the Fall in your own life is bad enough, or in the world in general, but seeing your own child suffer and their beauty distorted is heart-rending.


Indeed,

Whatever issues our child faces, will never ultimately be resolved in this life.  Our greatest need is the resurrection--new life, new hearts, new bodies, and redeemed souls...Whether our baby lives his whole life without any skin blemishes or not, he desperately needs the hope of the resurrection--the surety that the old will be made new.

Saturday, however, found me contemplating not the effects of the Fall, but a beautiful life.  My first-ever experience as a Little League mom turned out to be more enjoyable than I expected.

Lizzy and Caleb heartily enjoyed rollicking in the grass, eating hot dogs, and playing in a big dirt pile with the other little siblings they befriended.


Jeddy had a great time.  The setting was beautiful.


Somewhere around the third inning I walked over to the new house and let myself in to use the bathroom.  It was a quiet haven from the cheerful public activity outside.  I breathed in that new house smell.  Then I stepped back out the door into the park, passing the flapping flag on the way to the ball field and thought, "Life just can't get any better than this."

C. S. Lewis wrote of our appreciation of beauty and goodness and the massive desire in all our hearts to know ultimate beauty:


Earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage.