Saturday, April 5, 2014

Your Puzzle is God's Garden


When assembling a puzzle, you have all the pieces formed and in front of you. 

Even if you did not have a picture to look at to see what the assembled puzzle was supposed to look like, with enough patience and time, you could fit all the pieces together in the way they were intended to fit. You could solve the puzzle.

What if each of the puzzle pieces was growing and changing?

And what if some pieces hadn't yet grown into the shape they were supposed to be in order to fit correctly to create an overall picture?

And what if other pieces rejected the path they were intended to grow in order to fit correctly?

And what if some of the pieces destroyed other of the pieces before they formed into what they were supposed to be?

It would be impossible to for a person to fit together this puzzle. It wouldn't be possible to make sense of this puzzle; in fact, it would see like this puzzle was a waste of time.

But this is how the pieces of our lives and the pieces that make up our individual selves look. We understand ourselves based on the pieces - the other people - we see in front of us.

They are constantly growing and changing. And sometimes we see external forces come and destroy pieces. And sometimes pieces shrivel up and die. And sometimes we always have pieces there that never fit and there is no place for them. Or pieces that are broken.

Sometimes when we follow God, when we are trying to figure out our lives and who we are, we see pieces that we want to hold onto because we've found a way to make them fit in with the other pieces of ourselves.

We might also know that these pieces, according to God, are sin.

For example, bragging. For another example, ridiculing other people for the sake of making people around us laugh. Or another example, worrying about current events, personally taking time out of our days to watch, as we are told, the "world go to Hell." Trying to control something beyond our control by ruminating on it, even though we cannot control or change other people, and can rarely successfully change ourselves.

We see these as pieces of our personality or our lives, pieces of the puzzle. Pieces of who we are. We try to fit them in and keep them, even though we can come to understand that God wants something better for us than these pieces we are holding onto.

We must trust in God. He isn't assembling a two dimensional puzzle with our lives based on a picture or based on the pieces that are in front of Him. His work of life is more mysterious than that.

He is working with things that do not exist yet, or things that, to our eyes and to our knowledge, are destruction. He is not assembling a puzzle but growing a garden.

Branches haven't yet formed, nor has their path been delineated. They may turn. He may clip back pieces so that next year, they branches will grow with more leaves. Weeds can encroach on His garden. Sometimes brush fires can burn out part of the garden. Sometimes even perfectly formed and healthy bushes or fruit trees can be planted in the garden and He can decide that He no longer wants that type of plant growing in this particular type of garden. Or certain plants, that are fully healthy in some climates of personality, simply do not grow in this particular type of soil and climate.

All of the gardens He creates will be lush and full, despite fires that come or weeds that come or plants that don't fit or trees that don't bare fruit or soil that has been so heavily salted by our enemies that it seems nothing will ever grow again.

We have to pray, and we have to trust in Him. He must allow Him to work. He must stop trying to fit together two dimensional pieces as if we can see the final, bigger picture, and we have to allow Him to grow the garden He wants to grow. Things that don't exist now, beautiful branches, things we can't imagine, will grow in places we don't expect. 

He wants to put out the fires and build a strong fence. He can see invaders coming and, if He allows them into the garden, it is so He can rebuild it better Himself.

We see this in the Passion and Resurrection. The Lord died so that the entire universe could be handed to Him as His garden.

Trust in God.

When I pray, I say, "Jesus, I trust in You." I say that after every Hail Mary and Our Father of the Rosary. When God hears this, when He hears the attempts that we make to trust in Him, He sheds so much light on our souls, on our gardens, that we can experience peace. In the midst of growth, He allows us to give into peace instead of sorrow, light despite tortures of soul. 

Peace is the overlooked pursuit because it doesn't fit into a puzzle. The world is still trying to control and fit together an unending puzzle, not solve the riddle of peace. The world cannot ever give or have peace the way God can because there is no puzzle with a finished picture that we can see. The world can never have or give peace because it would have to give up a futile attempt at control, give up the concept that there even is a puzzle. 

We have to realize that we are God's garden and that God will grow it to a peaceful, beautiful state if we trust in Him and pray, and do not keep looking at things as a set, frozen puzzle with a final picture that is "supposed" to fit the way we think, or in a way that we can even begin to fathom.

I'm "supposed" to have this or supposed to be that or supposed to be in this place in my life because society has said this, or I'm supposed to concern myself about these events or this news. But the inner workings of the soul are always neglected in this "puzzle," because the inner workings of the soul aren't two dimensional like this, but grow up and out and are subjected to both time and eternity. There are many more dimensions to the soul.

Written by Tiger Boldradish

Friday, April 4, 2014

Atheists are so hip

Yanno, sometimes I just wake up in the morning and I pray, Oh God, atheists are so hip. They are so cool. They are the coolest people in the entire universe. And they know it. That's what makes them so cool. God, I wish I were as cool as an atheist. I think I'll become one so that I can be as hip and cool as them. They are just SO HIP. Because the only way to be hip and cool is to deny You. ... SO. DANG. HIP.

No. No I don't.

I hope sarcasm makes God chuckle.

I hope He isn't chuckling from the Cross as He dies for my sins and my salvation, out of eternal love for me, to share with me everything that is His that I might share my tiny heart with Him. ... Because I would imagine that chuckling on the Cross would be excruciatingly painful.

Written by Tiger Boldradish

Thursday, April 3, 2014

God's Water, God's Art



Water continues to mold and shape this rocky planet.

Water is a foreign invader to this world.

It's from space.It came here because gravity called it here, and it was subjected to the influence of gravity. **

Since that time, it has conquered the world.

Water changes and forms and molds it as easily as a child plays with a toy, despite its foreign origin.

 The world was made to be shaped by water and gravity, and is constantly shaped by these two forces acting together.

 God uses these two the way a painter uses color.

Instead of painting with pigment, He created and paints with real, actual water. 

The water itself is the equivalent of color.

How much greater an artist is God compared to man.

How humbled is man by the art of God. He paints these stones in water over time to shape them, and He does this solely to please Himself.

 How many art projects He has on this earth that man has not discovered or seen.

He does not paint hidden fields with flowers for anyone to see and behold and approve or disapprove of.

 He paints them to please His own eyes with the work of His Hands.

 How many unnoticed or undiscovered art projects He has.

Most of them are unseen. Infinite amounts are passed by people.

He alone enjoys them and this is very satisfying to Him. He is constantly building up and breaking and shaping and growing, with tools of gravity and water and light and matter.

 The world sees art vastly different than He does. For men, art is "stopping." Art is freezing a moment in time, capturing it.

http://molidae.tumblr.com/image/81576149720

 For God, art is the constant change. It is the change itself.

The canvas never rests. The movement and constant change of the subjects, from the moment of it's creation to it's end, the process, the process that never stops and never rests and effects every thing, is what is the art.

 For Him, not only is the growing of flowers on the field on the side of a mountain is art, but so to is the change that occurs before, during and after that mountain erupts and lava burns up the flowers and covers the earth with rock. 

Because He did it.

It is not a bad thing but yet another of His constant art.

 His changes are the art. His building and breaking and shaping, that is the art. That is not how the world sees art. And that is not how the world sees the destruction of a field of flowers by lava.

But it is all His art.

 That is why He is constantly building and destroying rooms in our own interior castles. We are His art, too, that is why He is constantly doing these things in our souls, why we are called to a lifetime of conversion.

 It is the conversion, the changes themselves that He is constantly after and enjoying, to satisfy, ultimately, no one but Himself and His own artistic sensibilities.

**" Earth got most of its water from asteroid impacts nearly 4.6 billion years ago, shortly after the solar system first took shape, a new study suggests."

 Written by Tiger Boldradish