Holy to the Lord -Part II

In memoriam in days of grief Even in the ugliest of times, the human heart longs for beauty and meaning.

Viktor Frankl spent three years in a Nazi concentration camp; "Man’s Search for Meaning is Frankl's surprisingly temperate story of the barbaric circumstances of camp inmates.

Reduced to simple survival, Frankl writes that many prisoners clung to a persistent—even increased—awareness of beauty.

They owned nothing, but purposely put aside the torment of their circumstances to appreciate what was in front of them.

Frankl describes one such moment:

" If someone had seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a Bavarian camp as we beheld the mountains of Salzburg with their summits glowing in the sunset, through the little barred windows of the prison carriage, he would never have believed that those were the faces of men who had given up all hope of life and liberty.

Despite that factor-or maybe because of it-we were carried away by nature’s beauty, which we had missed for so long. " (1946/1992, pp. 50-51)

Enslaved in unspeakable conditions on a frozen terrain without shoes or coats, harassed by guards and without hope of rescue, prisoners often noted to one another the “nice view of the setting sun shining through the tall trees of the Bavarian woods.”

They hurried to encourage other exhausted inmates to come away from a meal of thin gruel to totter out to “see the wonderful sunset,” perhaps for their last time.

It does not appear that Frankl knew our God personally, but he was right about this:

“...everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." ******************

Just before my mother died, I asked my father what I could do for him, the 93 year old soldier who let no one else care for the 87 year old stroke victim who was left of his beloved wife of over sixty years.

He shrugged helplessly, hands in his pockets, and said, “I just want my old life back.”

It doesn’t make me sad anymore remembering this.

Instead I thank my father for his observation; every day I am reminded that, though there will be more to come later, this IS my old life.

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I grieve when I think of all Jesus’s disciples suffered to bring the gospel to me.

But then I remember their names written on the stones of the foundation in the new Jerusalem.
 And when I lament my own shortcomings and paltry attempts to illustrate His word, I remember that everything done in His name—all of it, even the least—is HOLY TO THE LORD.

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“But I made this painting so that others would be able to feel God through it; it sits here unseen in my house!” I lamented to my friend who does not speak needlessly.

“Maybe,” he said thoughtfully, “it was just for you.”

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Selah (pause and think on this)