Beauty Breaks Free

 

I always look forward to the house with the white picket fence. Children live there, so there are many signs of life to enjoy. It is a lovely home on a corner lot. And the yard is always adorned with beautiful flowers.

This image struck me as particularly beautiful today. I love the way the flowers seem to be breaking free from the confines of the yard. They seem to be escaping into the larger world, their beauty too great to be contained. It is as if they are trying to reach out and touch each person who passes by on the sidewalk. And, in a way, they do.

Isn’t it interesting how, in a culture where we constantly go for big and seem to overindulge in almost everything, it is so often the simple things that touch our hearts? A homemade card or handwritten note. Hearing from a friend unexpectedly. An act of kindness when we need it the most. Children at play. A sunrise. A flower. A smile.

All these things, and countless others, are ways that beauty is trying to break into our world and into our lives. Like the flowers along the picket fence, beauty is reaching out to us, trying to draw us out of ourselves, our worries, our pain and sorrow. Beauty invites us to raise our heads and lift our eyes.

Isaiah writes, “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.”

We can be people who bring the beauty of good news and peace and happiness and salvation in God’s love. We don’t have to be a prophet or a preacher to do so. We just have to live into and live out of the love we have experienced from God in our own journey. We can speak a word of hope. We can live out of a place of peace. We can share happiness along our way. We can tell of God’s love and forgiveness and grace. We can be the means through which beauty breaks free into the world. That , to me, sounds like a life worth living.

Peace.