Fifteen minutes before midnight my eyes open without a prompt, but bleary. I don what I laid out before my nap, hoping the layers will be enough for a clear night dipping into the 40s. Within 10 minutes my truck is carrying me, my preloaded telescope and camera equipment, and a cup full of Frosted Flakes to meet a previously evasive triplet of galaxies in Leo. Well, I’ll be in Kaufman, but the galaxies are in Leo, where they have hidden behind clouds, blended into the moon’s light, and mocked my other commitments for well over a month.
Proverbs lauds relationships (a friend always loves; a brother is born for when you have trouble) and then warns about them (do not forsake your friend and your father’s friend; a brother offended is less forgiving than a walled city, and arguing with him like being jailed in a castle). To see the value in others and not the cost in them would be foolish, and vice versa. Paul as Picasso, the Corinthian letters are (a gentler) Guernica (seen above). Every piece of the body is necessary, makes the painting beautiful; each part of the body introduces conflict, reveals tension.
I am not a night person, but I target my telescope and expose my camera’s sensor to the dark sky next to Dr. Campbell’s cow and two goats (sheep? It was dark) from 30 minutes after midnight until 90 minutes before dawn. Heaven’s beauty compels me. Everything else wants me to sleep. Image captured (seen above), the tension between the three galaxies is obvious. Only one of the three remains a relatively pristine spiral, so far. In one, the colors and irregularity mark its disruption by the gravity of the others; in another, the dust band through its middle is clearly distorted at both ends. The gravity relating them makes them together one of the most desirable images in the night sky while at the same time stressing and reforming each of them. The attraction and distress are inseparable.
Commands are about things otherwise neglected, even avoided. We rarely need a commandment to breathe. Is it possible that the easiest neglect requires the greatest commandment? Even if a love is unconditional, love itself is conditioned by requiring the relationship. For the same reason, worth and cost, though opposite, are practically synonymous. Friendship, kinship, and love bring pain with pleasure, inconvenience with completion, change with endurance. Relationships do not happen to be difficult. Their difficulty is what makes them so valuable in reshaping us; their reshaping us what makes them so attractive and so challenging.
Relationships contorting us may be God conforming us to his son’s image.
To a week grateful for the people God uses to paint us into his creation.