Learning Beauty

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. (Genesis 1:1) The worms, the sprickets, the naked mole rats --all manner of critters who are either so ugly they evoke some sort of pity causing us to be tender toward them, or they make our skin crawl. He created trees which, in this season, are more fiery and more impressive than those earlier days of the year when their leaves were plump and variegated with chlorophyll, their very life's blood. He created sky and sea, hill and vale, winter chills and summer heat. He created the smell of jasmine and gardenia and peat and sulfur. He created daylight by which we work and darkness by which we were meant to sleep. He created our unruly hair (which we may think for certain came as a result of The Fall) and our T-Rex arms. He created pitch-perfect voices and those that crackle and screech like a murder of angry crows. He created fingers that obey when we put brush to canvas and those that, in their fierce rebellion are perfectly adept at whizzing over a keyboard as they enter data. And He said it was good. When it came to mankind, God said His creation was very good. 

What I'm repenting of today, however, is why I have done Him such a disservice, such a dishonor by not noticing. Never mind how I've critiqued every square inch of my body. Never mind how I grumbled at my tiny children's inability to do things for themselves --Mom, can you get my ball out of the tree? --just as I'd sat down for the first time that day. Never mind how I've avoided talking to the friendly chatterbox who hangs out by the coffee station. Never mind that I have resented His choices in how He has created or developed the people and things around me --that's a whole different level of offense for a whole different article --but I am guilty of simply not noticing. I am guilty of not even seeing the beauty in the faces of those He has created, of not breathing in deeply the crisp autumn air, of not resting beneath a tree in summer, of not whispering Amazing! as the sun begins to set in a sky that makes Crayola green with envy. Of being so busy, so familiar, so critical, and so wrapped up in myself, I walk past the many gifts He's given again and again without so much as a single nod. A dull grey sky today? Yawn. And yet, we are without excuse. There is goodness in everything He has made. He said so.

Annie Dillard, in her book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, strives to understand the song of birds:

Sometimes birdsong seems just like the garbled speech of infants.  There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

Today I watched and heard a wren, a sparrow, and the mockingbird singing. My brain started to trill why why why, what is the meaning meaning meaning? It's not that they know something we don't; we know much more than they do, and surely they don't even know why they sing. No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. ... The real question is: Why is it beautiful? 

It's beautiful because it is a gift, straight from the imagination and nature of an infinite God. It is beautiful because He made this world and all He placed in it for His glory and for our benefit. We have been tasked with the responsibility of tending and keeping this world; of living in it; we are not mere property managers, but witnesses of the very personality of God as revealed in His creation. We must steward the beauty and wonder of it in addition to simply guarding against abuse, for beauty and wonder are in the Creator's nature. Today I am challenged to stop my foolish, self-centered bustling --those things I think are so relevant (like the garbled speech of a child delivered with passion but lacking real meaning) --and learn the beauty of the people and the world around me by looking for our Father's character in it.