For Glory And For Beauty

“And you shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother, for glory and for beauty.” – Exodus 28:2

The hardest thing about moving here was feeling like I didn’t know who I was anymore. The first year felt like a deconstruction and reconstruction of self: like a vivisection of my identity. It wasn’t until I left the milieu I had lived in my entire life that I realized some ways I saw and felt myself were only true where I used to live. They weren’t true here. And I wasn’t sure yet who I was here. It felt like I was being peeled apart and then trying to grow myself whole again, but feeling tender and fragile all the while. It was a lonely experience.

At points I sort of struggled to go on. One of these times, I was on lunch break during a clinic day at Kaiser. I had managed to finish my morning patients with enough time to sit in the downstairs café. I had let Diane talk me into reading the Bible in 90 days, which basically meant I whipped out my Bible every spare moment I had, so I started reading Exodus over lunch and came to this chapter. Suddenly, I felt like God was speaking to me: “And you shall make holy garments for Esther, for glory and for beauty.” I started weeping as I read about the beautiful colors, the skillfully woven details. The breastpiece with rows of jewels, each one inscribed with the names of his people. I didn’t know how to see myself. Some days it was okay, some days it was bad. But this was how God saw me. If Jesus was my high priest, it was my name jeweled upon his chest; when God saw me, he saw something of great value, beautiful and precious.

In a way, that moment of clarity was a gift. Because I was suspended between cultural worlds, with all the identities we build for ourselves stripped away or not yet formed, I was able to receive a deep spiritual truth: that in the eyes of the only One who matters, I was more precious than all the jewels in the earth. I was loved with great care and attention and skill. God knew exactly who I was.

I love the part in Revelation 21 when John goes high up on a great mountain and is shown the Bride, the new Jerusalem, descending out of heaven, “having the glory of God, its radiance like a most rare jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal.” Its foundations are adorned with twelve kinds of jewels, nine of which are the same ones that are in the breastpiece of Exodus 28. God not only knows who I am; he will bring me home. All of life is a sojourning until we get there, until we live by the glory and beauty of God himself.