I love my wife and my wife loves flamingoes. She wears flamingo shirts, necklaces, and pendants. Every where I turn around in our house now I see flamingo pictures and magnets and flamingo decorations. So while staring at a Flamingo picture, I suddenly had an ecstatic experience of the holy. Somehow as my eyes were transfixed, my heart grew larger by God's unexpected grace and love.
Like Job in the Bible, I contemplated a bird that is often viewed as ugly or insignificant and ran squarely into the significance and beauty and grandeur of God. I never fully understood why Job had to go through so much suffering, so much pain, so much loss? But the growing revelation is we often experience God's grace and power at work in our lives in these terrible times of darkness. In the darkness we see God's brilliance. In the darkness we discover the God who lights our path. In the darkness we come to an end of our way of doing things and seeing things and see everything in a new light and see God mysteriously moving in ways we never understood before.
So contemplating on a picture of a flamingo revealed not only my smallness but God's greatness. In the descent of contemplation one is lifted up (resurrected) to new heights of discovery and ascension. If Job came away at the end of the book a different man, I find myself going through my own mystical desolate moments only to find that I am the one changed in the process. I find in my own mystical moments that I am a different man changed by the grandeur of God's beauty in the face of Jesus Christ.
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