This past Sunday night, as I was pulling into my driveway after a fantastic post-worship fellowship time with some friends, I had a sudden urge.  An urge to build something.  Something real and beautiful.  Something with bricks and mortar.  Something that would be hard to build, that would involve a certain degree of physical suffering, with dirty hands, and scraped knees.  Something that, in the end, would teach me something about life and about myself, and about my place in God’s world.  My own piece of culture to His glory.

As this urge passed, my mind immediately jumped to a line from the movie Fight Club:

I felt like destroying something beautiful.
- The Narrator

Those who have seen the movie will understand both the motivation and manifestation of the Narrator’s desire.

The next day I tried to understand where my urge to “build something beautiful” came from.  I am good at putting furniture together, but I am not what you’d call “good with my hands” in any sense.  My crafts are more of the digital variety.  But as I read more about the Covenanters, about Christian aesthetics and culture building in general, I have lately been overcome with a desire to produce something real.  I am not really sure what yet, maybe it’s as simple as piece of pottery, or as complex as a treehouse, or any number of things in between.

Whatever my piece of culture turns out to be, it’s clear to me that the Narrator’s urge to destroy beauty is the natural consequence of his nihilistic outlook on life.  To the nihilist, the idea of beauty, of value, is a false one, invented and perpetuated by man over the centuries.  Therefore, the destruction of beauty (or anything with value) is actually an act of liberation from the prison of human constructs.  Conversely, a person who understands that we live in God’s world, and that beauty is not a human idea, but proceeds from God’s very essence, will try as much as possible to reflect that beauty in the world around him, either through art, music, child rearing, planting a garden, building a website, or whatever, as a way to point to true liberation: new creation life in Jesus Christ.

In the battle between creating and destroying, what side are you working for?  I would humbly suggest that you build something beautiful, to the glory of God.