Beauty All Around Us
I was driving when I saw it. A rainbow; but not the kind you glance at and keep moving.
This one stretched wide across the sky, bold and unapologetic, with the most perfectly
formed cloud at its base. It looked like something out of a painting. And I was giddy.
Genuinely, embarrassingly giddy. I was on the phone with my husband, and I could not
stop talking about it. I kept pointing at the sky as if he could see it through the phone.
And for the rest of that evening, every time the image came back to me, I smiled. From
the inside. And then a quieter thought followed: how much of this am I missing every
single day?
God was not careless when He made the world. Genesis shows us a Creator who was
deliberate, thorough, and deeply intentional. Every tree. Everybody of water. Every
creature. The sky and everything in it. And after each thing He made, He looked at it and
called it good. That means on any given day, you and I are completely surrounded by the
goodness of God, in the color of the sky, in the sound of rain, in the way sunlight falls
through a window in the late afternoon. Beauty is not scarce. But our attention is. We
move so fast, carry so much, and have so many places to be that we have trained
ourselves to look past it. And in doing so, we are walking through a gallery God curated
for us, eyes fixed on the floor.
I want to invite you to look up. Not just once, but as a practice. On the hard days
especially, the ones where the weight of a season is pressing down on you and joy feels
far away, look for something beautiful. A bird. A flower pushing through concrete. The
face of someone God deliberately placed in your life, because He called people good too.
You do not need a dramatic rainbow to feel it, though I hope you get one. You just need
to slow down long enough to notice what has always been there. God has placed beauty
all around you. It is one of the quieter ways He speaks. And when you find it! Really find
it; it has a way of shifting something in your chest, repositioning your heart, and
reminding you that the God who painted the sky this morning has not forgotten about
you.