Celebrating Beauty

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You don't have to be impressed. My most recent revelation isn't anything you haven't heard before. But, it's true. It's something that I've heard and 'known' for as long as I've walked this earth. Only recently when I said it out loud and understood it with my life experience, did I realize it's profundity.

Struggle, hardship, and difficulty are synonymous with life itself.

Peace and joy on earth are coupled with heartbreak and sorrow.

Ashes and beauty take turns.

The most recent season of my life has been one of the tougher I've endured. Hell, the twenties themselves haven't been altogether peachy. Every year has brought with it loss, self-doubt, financial uncertainty. The Lord has broken me time and time again, revealed my selfishness, my false self-sufficiency, my ugly ugly sin.

And in the midst of all of that, there has been great joy. And astounding beauty. And plenty of laughter.

You see, they go together. They weave in and out of each other like fabric fibers. Once I get through one hard thing, it doesn't mean I'm excused from life's hard knocks forever. Financial/relational/aspirational peace may eventually come, but only in Christ does it really last.

If I'm going to enjoy this life, I'm going to have to choose to celebrate who my God is through it all. When life is colorful and easy, I'll have to remember to praise Him, from whom it all flows. When I grin and bear through the worst, I'll put my pennies in the bank that, it too, is grace.

Shauna Niequist says, "When you realize that the story of your life could be told a thousand different ways, that you could tell it over and over as a tragedy, but you choose to call it epic, that's when you start to realize what celebration is."

I've seen the underside of beauty this week, in the lives of my church, in the hearts of my friends. I've realized that if it's not me, it's her, or her. Unrest isn't hard to spot when you look for it in the lives of the people you love.

But hope—a believer's underground root system—is there to be noticed. Life is in the heart-pricking depth of someone's words, it's in the flowers in your front yard, it's in the toothless grin of your six year-old next door neighbor. Lord, open our eyes, that we might see the epic story in the daily and the Divine.