Behold the Beauty!

I have seen as much beauty in a sin­gle cac­tus blos­som as in a rose gar­den. The Broad­way play I saw in New York was on the same order as the children’s Christ­mas play here at church. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” — but it is mostly in the heart. Some­where along the way in life, you dis­cover that peo­ple see dif­fer­ent amounts and forms of beauty.

Me?

I see it everywhere…and always have. I used to won­der if I was going to grow up to be the vil­lage idiot. As a teen, I could become totally absorbed just look­ing at a cloud in the sky. My spir­i­tual per­cep­tions seem to be par­al­lel to this. I have heard some great lec­tures in the­ol­ogy and some equally pro­found state­ments from small chil­dren. They too are on the same order. I am some­where between Ein­stein and Gump. It takes intel­lect and child-like sim­plic­ity to appre­ci­ate both great and small.

It is all in your abil­ity to behold. It must be some sort of gift. No two are alike. Every­one sees things a lit­tle dif­fer­ently. What­ever is hap­pen­ing is hap­pen­ing around focal points. Some­thing gets your atten­tion. A sin­gle moment on a rou­tine drive can leave you won­der­ing for days. How or why the heart reaches out to a sym­bol or event is still beyond com­plete analy­sis. The com­plex­ity of the soul and its desires would take a library per per­son on this planet to describe.

Some were attracted to Jesus, some were repulsed. He was ignored by some and wor­shipped by oth­ers. The dis­tinc­tion had lit­tle if any­thing to do with money, race, lan­guage, or social rank. There seemed to be a few more of the poor and rejected, but there is always an abun­dance of those, and the gospel writ­ers were not all that inter­ested in sta­tis­tics.

If you are blessed by a sense of won­der, if you have the capac­ity to appre­ci­ate beauty in its infi­nite forms, if you can find joy in the moment or laugh­ter in life’s con­tra­dic­tions, then you are able to behold life for the best it has to offer.