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Searching for Beauty

A couple years ago my wife and I got a chance to visit a dear college friend who now lives in San Diego. San Diego is a beautiful city. The weather seemingly is always a balmy 86--with a 3 degree swing cooler overnight. No matter where you are in the city you are only 20 minutes away from a view of the Pacific Ocean. I'm pretty sure that the Garden of Eden may have actually been San Diego pre-flood era or something.



My guess is that if you were to ask someone born and raised in San Diego, they wouldn't have nearly the same excitement that Katie and I had. After all, we all get bored with what surrounds us. When someone with an oceanfront property wakes up, they don't sit and gawk at the ocean the same way a Midwest American would. Someone from the West Coast likewise might be intrigued by the symphony of cicadas on a summer night in Ohio because they are unfamiliar with that experience.







We get so ingrained in our habitual routines that many (or maybe most) days we forget to look around us and see the beautiful world we are living in. 

True talk:
There are days I wake up and I view Katie as a working partner--we have tasks to accomplish that day and so we put on our grubby clothes and get to work. There is no romancing or flirting. There is little thought about wooing or kanoodling. Yet when I stop and think about the beauty that I have married, I am blown away by God's creation! He has given Katie beautiful attributes that cannot be stripped away by age, surgery, diet, or disease. But all of those qualities can be so easy to miss because I see them everyday. Routine and habit draw a veil over my eyes and I miss seeing those beautiful attributes unless I pause and reflect on them. 

Cincinnati can seem like an awful boring place to live from day-to-day. In the summer things get really hot. In the winter they get really cold. We don't have exotic wildlife, botany, or bodies of water (unless you count brown and sludgy as exotic...). We have mediocre sports teams, colleges and terrain. It would be pretty easy to overlook the beauty that God has put around us every single day. If you don't look closely. 

We are just far enough north to not have poisonous snakes and for the insects to die during the winter, but we are far enough south to avoid bears and frozen winters. We aren't on any major fault lines or tornado allies, we don't get hit with hurricanes or floods. We have such lush vegetation that it will grow anywhere, especially in cracks in the sidewalk. And we have a pretty diverse group of people groups ranging from German and Guatemalan to African and Appalachian. 

Beauty is all around us, we just have to see it with fresh eyes. 

We have to search for hidden beauty. 

Look closely.
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Comments

  1. singredeemed83July 7, 2016 at 11:14 AM

    You are a delight, my love. I appreciate your perspective. Here's to living with eyes wide open!

    ReplyDelete

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