The Beauty of Woe

A few days ago, I babysat a beautiful, pouty-lipped little girl with bright blue eyes and blond curls. She isn't speaking yet so most of her communication consisted of grunts and pointing. She was rather more discontent than the last time I watched her which translated into crying jags where she shoved both hands in her mouth causing her face to become a wet, slobbery mess of saliva and mucus. Whenever I attached her to my hip, said excretions usually ended up on the upper sleeve of my shirt. Or my pants. She was just a lot soggier than I remember. Upon mentioning this to a friend later in the day, he shook his head and responded, "I don't like kids." Although I do like them for the most part, I get it. They're noisy and demanding; full of snot and saliva; their poop has to be wiped from their butts with what is essentially a wet nap; and they exist in the world as if the world exists for them. And for the span of several years, it does seem to, because unlike dogs, you can't just take them to the kennel when you go on vacation.

Yet in the fading part of the day, I stood in the basement of our coffeehouse at a worship service, my soul so moved within me that I was becoming a blubbery mess myself, when it hit me. In comparison to a God whose gleam makes Mr. Clean look like he's been rolling around in a dugout, humans are like that all the time: wet with snot and tears, red-eyed and blotchy, dirt under our fingernails, smelling like Cheerios and hot dogs, orange pasta stains on our shirts. We're kinda gross. And loud. And insistent. We grunt and gesture towards what we think we want when we don't have the language to make ourselves understood. And when things don't go our way, we throw fits. When God does something we don't comprehend, when His answer to a prayer is something that doesn't jive with what we think is right, we turn our face to the wall, cross our arms and either pout and maintain a stony silence, or wail at the injustice of it all. We try to understand His reasoning with the rationale of a two year old trying to understand why Mommy isn't letting her eat that perfectly tasty looking tab of dish detergent.

Gross as it may be, all that snot and mucus looks a little different to us when it's smeared all over the face of someone that's imprinted with our specific genetic code. They're ours. Although we can't explain why we love them, we do. It's the most basic and intrinsic thing. I realized in that moment, tears making tracks down my cheeks and nose snottier than usual, that I may never understand why God really created us in the first place: why He brought us into a world knowing bad things happen and that we'd get hurt, and although He would have the power to keep us from everything that would cause us pain, He knew from the beginning that He wouldn't. Just as we know when we have kids, just as our parents knew when they had us. Despite the agony and the discomfort we know they'll endure, we come together and bring something into existence because we love: a thing that can't be proven or written out in a scientific formula; a thing of which no evidence found in the bowels of the Earth can explain the power. It just is. It's a Love that gently forms our features, paints our personalities, and fosters dreams within our souls. In that perspective, the sliminess coating the scrunched up features of a squalling child doesn't look so bad. Because I look like that to God quite a bit. And He picks me up, Shamwows my face with a Kleenex and loves me anyway. It's beautiful, deep and prehistoric, but one thing it is not is comprehensible.