I had the TV on while I was working and in the background, I heard this sentence, “There’s no beauty in grief.” It caught my attention. I wondered about it. My husband philosophizes that there’s beauty in truth.
For me, it’s a weird concept because I never had the same concept of beauty that other people did. For example, I never liked the human nose on anyone. I could see a picture of a supermodel and I would still think that the nose wasn’t beautiful. At the same time, I have this picture hanging up in my house of a skull with some roses. The contrast between a symbol of decay and the brightness of the red roses to me is beautiful, especially because the skull doesn’t have a nose.
I think it is all relative. We decide where we see beauty and where we see truth. Most importantly, it really is up to us, whether or not we open ourselves up to see the light of God. As I walk along this path, I see many of the same things as my brothers and sisters do, I will experience many of the same sensations and situations as they do, but will I be able to really understand? When I was younger, my biggest fear was living as the main character in the fairy tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. I didn’t want to be walking around totally naked and having everyone else know and not tell me what an ass I was being. I didn’t want to be a bad person and not know it or be able to do anything about it. Now that I am older, I realize that everyone is an ass sometimes. Everyone has good and bad qualities. I am not the best person, but I am not the worst person either. I shouldn’t care about how the world judges me, God made me this way and He doesn’t make mistakes. So, now, the only thing that really worries me is going through life like the emperor in that story. In other words, being so totally self-absorbed that I can’t even notice when I am naked or to notice the other people around me. I don’t want to go through life being a zombie just eating, going to the bathroom, sleeping, and surviving. I want to be aware of the gift God gave me. I want to understand it and be thankful for it.
I don’t know if life is beautiful, but I do know it is a miracle of God. Every single second that I am alive is a gift. I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to live in gratitude for that miracle.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
