On Being Dust

Greetings Dear Reader,

When I was very young and there were true hippies in the world we had a salmon coloured hurculon fabric sofa.  It was itchy and uncomfortable but it was what we had.  Its position in the living room allowed the afternoon sun to cascade across one end of it creating a perfect sleeping place for the cat or the women in my household.  What it provided for me was a simple fascination that I can be mesmerized by to this day.

When I had the couch to myself and the sunlight would move across the hardwood floor to the sofa I would anticipate how it would reflect off of the salmon hurculon and the intermittent golden threads in the fabric.  Then I would pound on the sofa sending hoards of tiny dust motes into the sunlit air.  I would watch them dance in the sunlight transformed from mere dust to dancing gold.

I saw such beauty in those specs of minute flotsam and jetsam.  The light turned dust into gold and I found great value in the transformation.  Years later I was reminded of this by a man from the seventeenth century.  He too had lain dormant for many decades and then rediscovered.  His writing gathered dust, was attributed to others, and sold as common fare in used condition.  Then the sun fell upon his works and they were returned to the world. Here is a sample:

Centuries of Meditations – First Century - 25

Your enjoyment of the World is never right, till you so esteem it, that everything in it, is more your treasure than a King's exchequer full of Gold and Silver.  And that exchequer yours also in its place and service. Can you take too much joy in your Father's works? He is Himself in everything. Some things are little on the outside, and rough and common, but I remember the time when the dust of the streets were as pleasing as Gold to my infant eyes, and now they are more precious to the eye of reason. – Thomas Traherne

Traherne Windows, Hereford Cathedral

It is just this perspective that makes us so valued by Christ.  We are dust.  We are the stuff of cast off as a result of our sin.  I am just dust, but then Christ shines his light in my life and I am able through him to do beautiful and amazing things.  It is not I that am golden but rather what I become in the light of Christ that can be radiant.  Without Christ I am still only dust.  He grants that dust all the riches of creation and all the riches of his kingdom as well. 

In my pursuit of Christ and his likeness this is the gold I take for my journey.  It is the way in which I can pay the price of hardship and hurt.  In this simple truth he has already filled my day with the gold of his creation.

Wishing you joy in the journey,

Aramis Thorn

Mat 13:52 So Jesus said to them, "That is why every writer who has become a disciple of Christ’s rule of the universe is like a home owner. He liberally hands out new and old things from his great treasure store."