What beauty is teaching me about finding hope and purpose
My first week of my first year away at college, I went to Target and bought decorations for my dorm room. I bought imitation ivy to pin to the walls and artificial flowers that matched my quilt. I probably spent about twenty dollars, and afterward I felt very guilty, which is probably the only reason I remember this inconsequential event.
My particular brand of youthful idealism centered around sacrifice. I had already wrestled greatly with the decision to spend the time and money to attend college when people were dying (literally and spiritually) all over the world. But I was an intensely practical young woman, so I was convinced by my parents’ argument that I would be more useful for the kingdom of God with a higher education.
However, decorations for my room? Totally superfluous. A child was starving to death in Sudan while I bought plastic ivy. Making my room beautiful felt excessive, extravagant, and therefore, selfish.
Though stewardship is still important to me, I had a lot to learn about beauty. Contrary to my youthful pragmatism, beauty is not purposeless. God created beauty; it reflects him, and my instinct to cultivate it is a part of his image in me.
Planting hope
I go to my garden in the evenings when my work is finished and the air is cool, and I am soul weary. The news of the day had crept out of dark corners like fire ants, biting, leaving welts: the bombings, the deportations, those starving children in Sudan. The heaviness of a friend with chronic illness or a husband who left, or my worries for my children, are like stubborn weeds that spring up unbidden, refusing to release, spreading, sucking up the life around them.
But then I notice tiny green filaments pushing up through dark soil, and with it comes an inexplicable surge of hope. Each successive day brings something new to see, to examine, and I water and watch as fragile stems metamorphose into poppies, gladiolas, daisies, black-eyed susans. The sunflowers stretch and peek over the fence. Lillies open their mouths and sing, faces to the sky. The hummingbirds and bees dance in a delighted frenzy of indecision. And suddenly I am no longer so heavy.
I dig my fingers in deep and pull out the weeds at the root, while somehow the exquisite detail of the purple larkspur seeps into my soul. As I force back what’s dead and lifeless to make room for Eden to flourish, suddenly the world doesn’t seem so dark.
