Blogging for God’s Glory: A Big Big Fridge

I like sharing excerpts from writing projects that are still far from completion. My friend John Beeson and I are working on a book called Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World: A Christian’s Guide. John is a pastor at New Life Bible Fellowship in Tucson, Arizona and a fellow blogger. This is how we begin the book.

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“Daddy, I painted this for you,” says my daughter Izzy.

Closing the door behind me and setting my work bag on the table, I bend over to look at her paper. She’s covered the paper with splotches of primary colors in the shape of people. The paper is still wrinkly from paint liberally applied. She places the painting in my hand.

“That’s wonderful,” I say while trying to figure out which way is up and which is down. I’ve learned from experience not to ask, What is this? Instead I say, “Tell me about this picture, sweetie.”

“It’s a doggie in our backyard, and all of our family is eating pickles,” she says, or whatever the picture was that particular day.

“Oh, I see. Can we hang this on the fridge?”

Izzy smiles wide. Her two front teeth are missing.

And we do. Along with all the others, we hang this one on the front of our fridge.

People tend to mark the stages of life. We save the paystub from our first paychecks, mount diplomas on walls, celebrate a marriage and a first mortgage. I’m in that stage of life where my fridge is covered in artwork from my children. They hand me watercolor paintings when I leave for work. They hand me colored pencil drawings when I come home from work. They come to work to hand me colored macaroni glued to construction paper. It’s wonderful. I don’t want it to end.

What I love most is the innocence of their gifts. My little Izzy doesn’t have a clue there is such a place as The British Museum where there hang works of Rembrandt and Rubens. Izzy doesn’t know anything about the Louvre in Paris that displays DaVinci’s Mona Lisa for 10 million visitors each year. All Izzy knows is our refrigerator, the two sides of the fridge and the front side of the fridge, which I guess we could call our three art galleries. The front of our fridge, or the main gallery if you will, receives nearly ten visits a day, or maybe one hundred visits in the summer when our children enjoy vacation and standing in front of an open fridge. But no one in our family visits the fridge necessarily to see her artwork. That’s the child-like innocence Izzy has when we mount her paintings. If an adult were to possess this kind of ignorance of the great works of art, especially an adult given to producing her own art, we’d called it something other than innocence; her ignorance would take on the pejorative, culpable sense of the word. In a child, however, the ignorance is admirable.

The purity of her gifts strikes me too. “Daddy, I painted this for you,” she says. Izzy paints not for fame or money or from the overflow of competition with her siblings, but for you, she says. When I say purity, I mean this kind of singlemindedness, the kind of joy captivated by and treasures only the smile of her father. No mixed motives, no duplicity. Only pure single-minded devotion.

I’m not saying children are innocent and pure and full of rainbows and bubble gum. I believe in original sin because I read of it in the Bible and also because I see it in the mirror and in the eyes of every one of my young children when—if their little arms were strong enough—might kill me rather than not get their way. Children are not pure and innocent in an absolute sense. As those downstream from our father Adam, we are sinners not because we sin, but we sin because we are sinners. As David writes, “In sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5).

I think about my children’s artwork often when I blog. Whether you think that makes me childish in the worst sense or the best, I’ll let you decide. But I like to think of God printing out my blog posts and hanging them on some heavenly fridge, which I’m sure is huge and made of stainless steel and always has an ice dispenser that works. I like to think of God stooping over to smile and say, “Tell me about this one, Benjamin.” I like to think God has a big big house with lots and lots of room and a big big fridge where he can host my blog.

Again, I hope these sentiments don’t betray my foolishness or ignorance or even my arrogance. I know my blog posts are only feeble and flimsy collections of words, while J.I. Packer’s book Knowing God has gravitas. I know that though the internet keeps a record of all my blog posts, should the Lord tarry, Augustine’s Confessions will still be read in ad 3,020 and my posts will be long forgotten. I know that as I blog about some suffering that feels weighty to me, Corrie ten Boom’s holocaust survival story makes my problems look like they are, light and momentary. From jails Bunyan and Bonhoeffer wrote masterpieces. And I, from my dining room table, have the gall to expect my Internet-published words should hang in the heavenly gallery? . . .

* Photo by Naomi Hébert on Unsplash