Corrie Ten Boom famously compared God’s providence to a tapestry which, as it is being woven, seems to be little more than a mess of threads and knots. But when finished it is turned over to reveal its beauty. You can read this in a poem she popularized titled “Life Is But a Weaving.” But she was not the only one who has made such a comparison. Long before Ten Boom the abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier wrote “The Pressed Gentian.” Years later the author J.R. Miller picked up on it and wrote a neat reflection that I thought you’d enjoy.

One Christmas a friend sent the poet Whittier a flower pressed between two pieces of glass. On one side, the appearance was without beauty, only an indistinct, blurred mass of something held beneath the pane, but on the other side the full exquisite beauty of the flower appeared delicately outlined under the glass. The poet hung the token on his window, turning the lovely side inward. Those who passed by outside, looking up, marked only a “gray disc of clouded glass,” seeing no beauty, perchance wondering that the poet would cherish anything so void of beauty; but he,


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