christopherhildreth

Have you ever had someone come up to you and you see that they are beaming with happiness and it ticks you off? They have met you in a moment where you were reveling in your own disgust with the world. You were happy being sad and frustrated, but they came anyway. A perfectly great opportunity to wallow in self-pity has been ruined.

Maybe it’s just me, but during those times of personal loathing of everything around me, the last thing I want to see is someone actually happy – and not just happy, really full of joy – beaming in the beauty of everything that is.

I thought I had it nailed down. I would quote the “everything has a season to mourn and cry…yada yada, yada…”, but I saw something that struck me as odd. Odd because we tend to have scriptures we quote almost out of habit. This time I found out I had been wrong.

Ecclesiasties 3:11 – “He has made everything beautiful, in its time.” How is it that I had missed that for soooo long? What are the real implications to this? Could it be that even those things that I don’t want to experience are beautiful at some point? I think so. When I look at my life, the moments that have become “beautiful” have been those that were, at the time, the most difficult to walk through. It was because of their hardness that they were able to etch out a part of me. Though excruciating at the time, the result was – I have to say it – Beautiful.

Isaiah 52 says, “How beautiful….are the feet of those who bring good news.”  I wonder if the pain that sometimes comes from “bringing the good news” often result in beauty, but that beauty is left unseen.  Today, look at those things that have brought pain, and view them with new eyes and instead of pain see the beauty.

This entry was posted on January 22, 2008 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Context, Influence. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.