I found beauty the other day in the last place I expected to find it—at the funeral of a good friend’s two-year-old daughter, who had drowned in their swimming pool.
I went there to mourn. To grieve. To support my friend and his family in whatever small way I could.
But somehow, they ended up consoling me.
They spoke almost entirely about the beauty of their little girl and how grateful they were for the opportunity to experience her—even if only for a few “eternal seconds” in this life.
Through their grief, they expressed gratitude that God had entrusted her to them and faith that they could now release her back into His care.
No…
I did not expect to find that kind of deep beauty that morning.
But there it was—not waiting to be captured or possessed, but waiting to be received by anyone willing to accept and embrace that searing kind of beauty that only God knows how to give—or make sense of.
There are those who seek after beauty as if it were something to “find” or “capture”—like a destination to be reached or a possession to be acquired.
To those who are constantly chasing it, beauty can become a perpetual, elusive leaf in the wind. It always seems to be within reach, but like a whisper of smoke, the moment we try to grasp it, it moves just ahead of us…
Forever beyond our reach.
Is it possible that beauty was never meant to be caught?
What if it is simply meant to be seen… experienced… received?
Why do we spend so much time searching for beauty when it is already within us?
When it is all around us?
Isn’t beauty defined, at least in part, by the way we choose to see the world? Could beauty be the lens through which we look?
You and I define it with every look, every blink of the eye, and every soulful stare connected to the heart.
Beauty is how our heart sees.
Perhaps that is why a perfectly mowed lawn can be strikingly beautiful to one person, while another sees beauty in the quiet, systematic routine of a mother caring for her children and holding a household together.
Neither is wrong.
Both are seeing.
I think beauty asks us to become quiet.
Its luster appears when we practice the right kind of intentional listening. Beauty is a bath you soak in. It is spiritual, and it becomes exquisite when combined with feeling.
Beauty is clarity of purpose.
It is simplicity at its essence.
It can be discovered in the smallest things, yet it can also overwhelm us in the vastness of a landscape or the serenity of an expansive sunset.
My personal favorites are the moments of beauty found between the mundane activities and ordinary tasks of daily life.
They do not happen because something was carefully planned or intentionally created. They appear because you were simply there…
Watching...
Listening...
Paying attention while doing the task in front of you.
“Beauty is its own excuse for being,” my dad once wrote to me.
I think I understand that a little better now.
Beauty does not always explain itself. It does not ask our permission before appearing. It does not promise to arrive only in comfortable places.
Sometimes it appears in joy.
Sometimes in birth.
Sometimes in music, nature, laughter, or the face of someone we love.
And sometimes, inexplicably, it appears in grief.
Kahlil Gibran wrote:Beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.Beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.But you are life and you are the veil.Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.But you are eternity and you are the mirror.
Perhaps, in other words, we are not merely searching for beauty.
We are part of it.
Beauty lives in what we are willing to notice. It is reflected in how we see other people, how we receive the experiences God gives us, and how we choose to carry them forward.
Accept the gift.
Reflect it upon everyone and everything around you.
Then drink in what comes back.
There is something sacred about seeing the world that way.
And something remarkably freeing.
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