beauty & one thousand gifts.

Ann Voskamp's book One Thousand Gifts is still challenging me. It has flipped my perspective upside down and challenged my daily definition of joy, compelling me to count the ugly as grace, transfiguring the ugly {conflict, boredom, mundane, annoyance} into beauty with thanks. Beauty is something I've always longed for, chased after. I've linked it to exotic mountain scenes in South America-- adventures summoning me. I've considered beauty something just out of reach, always.
But lately I've been learning that it's not. Beauty is everywhere. It's in me, its in the walks across campus that bring me joy, it's in the lakeside picnics with friends. It's in washing a sink full of dishes and sweeping the kitchen floor. It's in the hard conversations and the ones full of laughter. It's in the spring blossoms, the sunsets, the thunderstorms, the long car rides...

I slip the camera out of the pocket of my apron. How can this sensor, point-and-shoot in the palm of my hand, capture what the eye sees, the soul memorizes. I kneel low on wheat stalks at the edge and I frame up the moon, I want to see beauty.

Oh, I've felt that. I know the moments are real and passing and I can't capture it; I know I ought to just soak in the moment. The striving stops, and the worry falls away. Joy and beauty are there.

Beauty is the voice endlessly calling and so we see, so we reach. Beauty requires no justification, no explanation; it simply is and transcends. See beauty and we know it in the marrow, even if we have no words for it: Someone is behind it, in it. Beauty himself completes.

I'm learning that beauty is not in the striving, the seeking, the worrying, the fearing. Wherever you are, be all there, trusting with open hands.