So last night I took Megan to the Missouri Botanical Gardens for the special Chihuly Nights Glass in the Garden exhibit.
If you're not familiar with Dale Chihuly and his glass-blowing artistry, it’s pretty visually amazing, especially when well-lit and seen up-close (which some pieces were more so than others). The colors are amazing and the designs absolutely alive. Chihuly is quoted as saying that his goal is to create art that looks “as if it just happened,” and his work certainly evokes a “live” feeling to it.
The installation has been in St. Louis for several months now, but I'm glad we went last night - it was a beautiful, warm December evening (60 degrees!), and the glass metaphor was a particularly good one for the occasion. As beautiful as the art was, I couldn't help walking in and among the pieces wondering just how he and his team transported and installed these things all over the world without shattering them to pieces? What happens if somebody breaks just a piece off? Is the work ruined? Salvageable, or just recycled for something else? I'm sure he's got insurance, but I don't even want to think about what his premiums are.
All this caused me to think about why we were there last night (to celebrate our tenth anniversary) and how much the glass metaphor seemed to make sense to me in describing marriage. Megan and I have truly had some absolutely beautiful moments together - vows honored, ideas shared, children born, hospitality created, grace given - but, in thinking more about them, the most beautiful moments seem to always have been the most fragile ones.
When I shared with Megan my thinking on this, she made the comment that she wasn't sure she liked the idea of describing our marriage in such a way (i.e. as glass). I told her I didn’t necessarily like it either, but if marriage is anything, it is beautiful and it is fragile; in fact, it seems to me that at least part of its beauty is in its fragility, and sometimes - as with Chihuly’s glass creations - I wonder just how God has kept ours from shattering to pieces.
“There are three things that are too amazing for me,
four that I do not understand:
the way of an eagle in the sky,
the way of a snake on a rock,
the way of a ship on the high seas,
and the way of a man with a maiden.”Proverbs 30:18-19