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There are tremendous contrasts between beauty and pain, jubilant-splendor and despair.

Ash Wednesday and Lent are to force us to take notice of Jesus’s suffering….40 days for forty days in the desert…His suffering contrasted with the glorious resurrection and the gift of our eternal hope for life in heaven.

Images in my head and on photos I took on my recent trip to home are of medieval portraits of the jubilant birth of a pudgy adorable Christ child… CONTRAST with the sorrowful painful sculptures of Christ dying on the cross…both these were on display at the art museum where I went solely to take photos of the beautiful valley up top the building on the hill…but soulfully I placed myself in the medieval art wing on my way back down… GORGEOUS…CONTRASTS…opulent joy and excruciating pain…

Next, I drove to the bridge overlook…high on top of the falls looking down the breathtaking gorge (and yet so commonplace here)…the icy water… and snow encased hills… the bustling city below…a gorge carved by 12,000 plus years of water cutting deeper into the crack ripped by the glaciers retreat…CONTRAST with the suicide catch nets…installed below to both catch jumpers, to hopefully prevent jumpers… A sad reality in a competitive college town… Hundreds of lives lost, tossed themselves away, hundreds of recovery efforts, brave rescue crews scaling the rocky gorge walls, risking their own lives to bring back the loved ones, who didn’t feel loved….
…When I stopped to take photos, I parked up with the vehicles of a crew of safety net checkers….the team was tossing a rope tethered mannequin onto the nets… three or four sections on each side… testing the thermal cameras that detect people. Twelve degrees was balmy in the sunshine which made the views extra beautiful… and made it extra hard on the testing crew…physically tossing the body over…again and again… pulling the heavy weight up with the rope… but necessary work to prevent eternal tragedy.

The contrast extra stark, between standing on the bridge for beauty or standing on the bridge for despair… GORGES…CONTRASTS…opulent joy and excruciating pain…

The contrast extra stark, between the Christmas gifted Christ child and the despair on the cross… GORGEOUS…CONTRASTS…opulent joy and excruciating pain..

IT IS GORGES…  
Gorgeous contrasts…

I thanked the safety net crew as I left…said “God bless you for this work”

I thanked God for the gorges and gorgeous views.

I thank God for Jesus…Christmas…Cross…Easter…joy…pain…joy…all a gift…

Jesus, a safety net for our souls.