BEAUTY - One Simple Way To Enrich Your Life

A brutalist building

I have often struggled to find beauty in certain things. When I moved to Yorkshire I found it difficult to appreciate the darkness of the buildings, charred black by years of smoke from the factories. Now I find the buildings beautiful, wrapped up in so much history and set into the landscape of rugged moorland.

I have a friend who challenges me greatly in seeing the beauty in things. 

The latest two areas he has challenged me in are working men's clubs and brutalist architecture, two things I disliked strongly until recently.

When speaking to me about them he draws me in with all that these structures represent to him.

I feel his passion when he speaks.

I am drawn into the deep sense of meaning that they carry within history and the formation of peoples.

I recently read ViktorFrankl's 'Man's Search For Meaning', one of the main things that struck me was when Viktor wrote about how during his times in the concentration camps he, and the other prisoners, had a deeply heightened awareness of beauty in the simplest of things.

He describes a walk to his workplace for the day, surrounded by disease and destitution. During the walk he looks up and sees the mountains. His heart is filled with the greatest sense of beauty upon seeing them.

Media outlets and marketers vie for our attention with ever increasing attention grabbers, hoping that we will look at whatever it is that they are trying to sell us. each advertising stunt becoming more and more excessive and extreme. We are so saturated with novelty and demands for our attention that we lose sight of the beauty that is found in normal things.

We forget that when God made the world, God looked upon ALL that had been made and declared that it is good.

I often wonder whether Christ on the cross looked out and saw beauty in the midst of suffering; whether it was this realisation that caused Him to declare "Father forgive them, they know not what they do".

I encourage you, stop what you are doing now.

Look around.

Can you see the beauty in your surroundings?

Can you find the goodness in it?

In our rushed saturated world we must take time to appreciate all that surrounds us.

We must remember that we can be sad that roses have thorns; or we can be glad that thorns have roses.

May we learn to stop and appreciate, may we see the beauty that surrounds us, and may we learn to see what it is that God sees when He looks upon this world.

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