Random Things of Beauty

Some days I feel like I have woken up with a special pair of eyes. Things just appear differently. It is almost as if my mind is taking pictures of various things that I find. And here is what I see... or a close approximation.

I'm driving to work on a street called Beale. The houses are not in great condition. The neighborhood, frankly, sucks. All of a sudden I look to my right and in front of a well-tended white house stands a woman of some indeterminate ethnicity. She stands at the fence that surrounds the property. What is beautiful about this? She is smiling. From ear to ear. It is not your ordinary smile, it is filled with peace. In that second of time, my heart lifted seeing someone that was at peace with the world and her surroundings, no matter how meager they might seem to spoiled rotten me. I wanted to pull over and ask her to include me. It was beautiful.

A little further down the road is this pink stucco house that I see almost everyday. It was not pink when I first laid eyes on it two years ago. It was grey and ugly. Hey, it is still ugly. But today I looked over and it seemed different somehow. It wasn't really ugly anymore, just worn. The pink exterior took on the look of a house that someone is trying desperately to bring back. It was no longer an eyesore. It was beautiful.

Rewind a day. I was in church on Sunday morning. Besides having a message that rocked my socks off (about Christians not just 'acting' like Christians, but 'being' Christians... God's continuity continues... see the previous blog) I got to experience really blessing the elderly folks in our congregation. As a worship leader, I can pray and pray and pray and still miss the mark with the songs that I choose. It depends on how everyone that is participating is feeling. For Sunday, since I did not know what the message was going to be beforehand, I picked songs that were meaningful to me. The first service is older hymns and some contemporary choruses. So I picked some hymns that were easily 100 years old and others that were within the last fifty years. May sound boring, but some of the words just grab you. For instance, "how sweet to hold a newborn baby and feel the pride and joy he gives, but greater still the calm assurance this child can face uncertain days because He lives." I have four children; this means something to me. That isn't what I intended to talk about, however. The thing that got to me was the fact that I look out at the congregation while I am leading and see these strong, older men crying. I'm sorry, there is nothing more beautiful than seeing a grown man cry over something that touched his heart.

Rewind a few more days. I think that I might have mentioned a funeral that my husband and I did for a family member of a group of sisters in our church. Let me back up. Five out of seven of these sisters have been removed from their mother's home and placed into foster care. The third sister is in foster care with a couple in our church that has a grown daughter. The couple has taken on the responsibility of helping the sisters in any way that they can. Well, the dad is a CPA and sometimes receives good in trade of services, especially from long term clients. Recently he was given a boat that was somewhere on the delta and the family made plans to go see it. They were going to Stockton for the day, but the foster daughter did not want to go unless her eldest sister could come, too. The couple said that this was fine and they set out. They were seeing the boat when the eldest daughter received a horrible phone call. A hospital in Stockton was calling to say that her father was there! Talk about odd coincidences. Unfortunately, he was there because he had been beaten and was on life support. The oldest daughter had to go to the hospital and make the call to take him off life support. Now none of that sounds pretty. I just saw that God was taking care of those young ladies.

How do you honor a man that might not have been much of a man, let alone much of a father? These s did an amazing job. Their father had ually abused all of the older s. He was a drunk and had gotten sober about two years ago. He had tried to go to each of the s and tell them how sorry he was. Even though what he did was dreadfully wrong, I have seen men do things like this and never admit to anything, let alone acknowledge the damage that it causes. I thought that this took courage on his part. The s planned a funeral that was about forgiveness, both of their father and their father's er. They picked appropriate and beautiful songs. I was also touched by my husband's sermon. He talked about how Jesus was beaten... that may seem a little off given the circumstances, but all I could think of was that Jesus understood what their dad had gone through. It was extremely touching to remember that Jesus was beaten for me. I cried thinking about what not only Jesus had been through, but what the s' dad had gone through as well. No one deserves to die that way.

Anyhow, some of that might have made sense and some of it probably didn't. All I know is that my day goes better when I am focused on random things of beauty rather than all of the ugly.

Love to you all out there, Muffinhound